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 scholarly research 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. Her scholarly research and production practice reflects on the possibilities for documentary to engage social change in the backdrop of the US historical context and how  the impulse moves through the introduction of portable analogue video recording equipment of the late 1960s and into a digital culture of mobilizing participatory media publics.

She is the author of scholarly essays in such journals as Visual Communication Quarterly, Studies in Documentary Film, and Feminist Media Studies. She is currently writing her second book, Documentary and Social Change: An Investigation of Participatory Media Culture(s), under contract with Oxford University Press. Angela is also an award winning director and producer of documentary shorts utilized in community engagement campaigns, exhibited at museums and viewed at dozens of film festivals around the world. She is currently working on her first feature length documentary, The Ritual.