Graduate Highlight - Camille Ciara Dantzler

This spring, Camille Ciara Dantzler graduated with a Ph.D. in African Studies. Her dissertation was titled "Rising Screen: Women Filmmakers, Poetic Politics, and the Developmental Cinema Complex of the Rwandan Film Industry (1991-2018)." In which she explores ways Rwandan women’s representations and participation in the film industry occupies civic space for women centered dialogue that can engender different modes of experimental social activism through the intersections of filmmaking, gender, and creative expression. This study posits that an interdisciplinary examination of film from the level of content and form, institutional engagements, and film culture can illuminate a more dynamic understanding of individual and collective navigation of life in Rwanda today.

This summer, Dr. Dantzler will be a Junior Fellow with the Library of Congress' Enhancing Access: Creative Digital Projects, and participating in Cornell University's Migrations Summer Institute: The Ongoing Afterlife of Dispossession in Africa and the Americas and the University of New Hampshire Writing Academy. In the fall she will be a Kean University Equity in Action Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow.