Angela J. Aguayo

Angela J. Aguayo (PhD, University of Texas, Austin) is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Culture at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is a media artist and scholar whose work creates connections between production, theory, and history. Combining a scholarly research interest in social change documentary with critical production practice, Angela has built an interdisciplinary, community engagement research agenda exemplified by the creation of programs like Girls Make Movies and the Rural Civil Rights Project.

Angela’s scholarly research and production practice reflect a focus on documentary, media studies, rhetoric, critical and cultural studies. She is focused on the possibilities for documentary to engage the process of social change in the backdrop of the US historical context. Specifically, how opportunities for social change emerge from the documentary impulse as it moves through the introduction of portable analogue video recording equipment of the late 1960s and into a digital culture of new media to mobilize participatory media publics. She is the author of scholarly essays in such journals as Visual Communication Quarterly and Studies in Documentary Film. She is currently writing her second book, Documentary and Social Change: An Investigation of Participatory Media Culture(s).

Angela is also an award winning director and producer of five documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns, exhibited at museums and viewed at dozens of film festivals around the world. Her work has screened in major media markets including New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago and at such prestigious sites as Anthology Film Archives and Harvard University. 778 Bullets (2011) is also under contract with California Newsreel for distribution and will soon be available for streaming to educational subscribers. Angela is currently working on her first feature length documentary,The Ritual.

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