Biography

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of the Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth.

She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011), A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, co-edited with Alisa Lebow (Blackwell Press, 2015), and Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking, co-edited with Yvonne Welbon (Duke University Press, 2018), AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, co-edited with Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani (Duke University Press, 2020), Really Fake! with Ganaele Langlois and Nishant Shah (University of Minnesota and meson Presses, 2021), We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, with Thedore Kerr (Duke University Press, 2022), and My Phone Lies to Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops as Radical Digital Media Literacy (punctum press: 2022).

Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She has directed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), Dear Gabe (2003) and Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998), and the shorts RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection.

She is the producer of the feature films The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010).

She and Anne Balsamo were the first co-facilitators of the network, FemTechNet, which debuted its feminist rethinking of a MOOC, a Distributed Online Open Course in 2013. The “Dialogues in Feminist Technology” project continues at femtechnet.org.

Her current work is on COVID and AIDS, fake news, online feminist pedagogy, and other more radical uses of digital media. Some of her work in critical digital studies and community is happening at fakenews-poetry.org, #100hardtruths-#fakenews, ev-ent-anglement.com and VHS Activism Archive.