Josslyn Luckett

Josslyn Jeanine Luckett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies; she is also affiliated faculty of NYU's Asian Film and Media Initiative. She holds a PhD in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. She also has an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her research interests include and combine media studies, jazz and improvisation studies, and comparative and relational Ethnic Studies, with special attention to the intersection of race, media, and social justice and to representations of Afrodiasporic spiritual practices in film and television. Her current book project examines the pre-history of the filmmakers known as the "L.A. Rebellion," by engaging the multiracial media "insurgents" of UCLA's Ethno-Communications Program, whose activist filmwork changed the face of independent media across Black, Chicana/o, Asian American and Native American communities in Los Angeles and beyond. She is also a screenwriter and playwright; she wrote the teleplay for the MTV Original Movie, Love Song, directed by Julie Dash, and in 2021 she joined the writing staff of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar (OWN) for its seventh and final season.

Recently appointed to the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, she is also a contributing editor for Film Quarterly. Her writing has also appeared in, Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making (Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, eds, 2021) and in World Records Journal, Public Books, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and the Los Angeles Times. A past fellow of the screenwriters and playwrights labs at the Sundance Institute and the directing lab at Film Independent, she is a long time member of the Macondo Writers Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros and has been a member of the Writers Guild of America since 1998.