Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She is a core faculty member in the Interactive Technology & Pedagogy and Film & Media Cultures Certificate Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center.

She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU (1991) and attended the Whitney Independent Studio program as a videomaker (1988).

Dr. Juhasz has taught at NYU, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Claremont Graduate University, USC, Pitzer College, and Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY about YouTube, media archives, activist media, documentary, and feminist film and video as well as media production, history and theory.

Dr. Juhasz writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work attends to fake news, poetry, online feminist pedagogy, YouTube, and other more radical uses of digital media and their archives.

Her work as media artist, curator, and writer engages with linked social justice commitments, including COVID-19, AIDS, black queer and lesbian media, feminist and queer/trans film, and activist archives and collectives. She publishes about her cultural and political commitments in scholarly and more public platforms including Hyperallergic, BOMB, MS, X-tra, and Lamda Literary Review.

Books :

My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy

We Are Having this Conversation Now

Really Fake

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises

Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making

Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary

Learning from YouTube

F is for Phony

Dr. Juhasz’s first book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1996) considers the contributions of low-end video production to political organizing and individual and community growth.

Women of Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) is a companion piece to Juhasz’s 1998 documentary of the same name. The book presents the complete interviews, allowing readers to hear directly the voices of these articulate, passionate women in an interactive remembering of feminist media history. Juhasz’s introduction provides a historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context for the interviews.

An earlier large-scale digital effort is Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics.

Recent Projects :

Holding Patterns Video Installation

Pandemic Media

In conversation with Thomas Allen Harris: DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY, Criterion Collection

I Want to Leave a Legacy: The video/activism of Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski

VHS Activism Archive

Aiming for the trees: Random Access Information and the Digital Video Study

… View more Projects by Dr. Juhasz …

Featured Interviews :

In conversation with Thomas Allen Harris: DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY, Criterion Collection

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: The Watermelon Woman, 2023 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Cheryl Dunye, cinematographer Michelle Crenshaw, and producer Alexandra Juhasz, in collaboration with the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, ...

The Power of Storytelling with Asma Naimi, podcast

The Doing Things with Stories (DTwS) project is an invitation for passionate changemakers to collectively imagine a better future by creating conditions of narrative change and meaningful interventions and approaches ...

‘I’m This. I’m That. I’m Many Things’: Pratibha Parmar on Andrea Dworkin and ‘My Name Is Andrea’

Queer feminist American scholar and video maker, Alexandra Juhasz, invited Pratibha Parmar, woman of color feminist and queer British filmmaker, to talk together about her most recent film, My Name ...

Narrative Feature Films :

The Watermelon Woman 20th Year Re-Master and Re-Release

Re-released for its 20th anniversary in a pristine 2K HD restoration, The Watermelon Woman is the story of Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye), a twenty-something black lesbian struggling to make a documentary ...

Distributed by the Criterion Collection

The OWLS

Four aging lesbians accidentally kill a baby-dyke and live to suffer the consequences. Ten years ago, The Screech was the hottest lesbian band around. But the mighty musicians have fallen ...

Digital video

Dr. Juhasz produced the narrative feature films, The Owls (2010) and The Watermelon Woman (1996), as well as nearly fifteen educational documentaries on feminist issues like teenage sexuality, AIDS, and sex education.

Featured Documentaries :

Holding Patterns Video Installation

A meditation on technologies of memory, with close attention paid to medium specificity, this installation considers how Zoom and other pandemic technologies composite onto ...

I Want to Leave a Legacy: The video/activism of Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski

Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957–2022) was a prolific AIDS activist videomaker. This is her final work, made in collaboration with friend and longtime collaborator, Alexandra ...

Beyond Story: An Online Community-Based Video Manifesto

Written by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow Featuring: Richard Fung (filmmaker) Cheryl Dunye (filmmaker) Ayana Dozier (film scholar) Susana de Sousa Dias (filmmaker/film scholar) ...

DiAna’s Hair Ego REMIX

Cheryl Dunye and Ellen Spiro, directors. Screened at Whitney Museum, Schomburg Center, nationally and internationally. In 1989, Ellen Spiro directed the short film, DiAna’s ...

COMPULSIVE PRACTICE

A video compilation by nine artists and activists who live with their cameras as one way to manage, reflect upon, and change how they ...

SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age

A documentary about ending the war in the media age. Ours is a time of illicit war, unchecked corporate greed, and a presidential regime ...

Video Remains

Producer/Writer/Director. Remembers and mourns the AIDS deaths and activism of the 1980s through one long-take interview of a dying friend. Queer Fests: London, NY, ...

Dear Gabe

Producer/Writer/Director. 6 college friends, feminists all, make diverse choices about creating and raising family. Queer and straight, black, white and in-between, Jewish and uncertain, ...

View Naming Prairie, Dear Gabe, and Women of Vision at vimeo.com.

… View other Documentaries by Dr. Juhasz …