Film Studies Faculty & PhD Students

Professor of Film Studies

Dr. Adrienne L. McLean is a professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author or editor of numerous books including Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom, Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s, and Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film (all by Rutgers University Press). 

Research & Teaching Interests: Dance and film; film history and theory; women and film; classical narrative cinema and studio-era Hollywood; stars and star images; U.S. theatrical dance history

Associate Professor of Film Studies and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies

Dr. Shilyh Warren’s research and publications focus primarily on documentary film history and feminist studies. Her first book, Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary (U of Illinois Press, 2019) tells the stories of women documentary filmmakers from two key periods: the 1920s and 30s and the 1970s. She has also written about contemporary feminist documentaries, especially films that advocate for justice for marginalized people or raise awareness about urgent political crises. Her latest research projects focus on the history of psychoanalysis and especially the roles played by women in Freud’s Viennese circle in the inter-war years. 

Research & Teaching Interests: Feminist theory; psychoanalysis; documentary studies; global cinema; visual anthropology

Associate Professor of Film Studies and Critical Media Studies

Dr. Laura Imoaka’s teaching engages in the areas of film and media studies, environmental cinema, and cultural and media studies methods. She has published on the political economy of geospatial technology and the (geo)spatial imagination of disasters in the journal Communication, Culture & Critique (2021), the edited collection titled Extreme Weather and Global Media (Routledge, 2015), as well as collaboratively in Digital Geography and Society (2024) and The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien (2018). She also has a background in cultural anthropology and fandom studies. 

Teaching & Research Interests: environmental cinema, disaster cinema, media studies, media and cultural studies methods, critical geographic information systems (GIS) studies 

Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Fellow of the Miriam Lewis Barnett Chair for Studies Related to the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights 

Dr. Hanno Berger’s research and teaching focus at UTD is on depictions of the Holocaust, genocide and human rights. His first book Thinking Revolution Through Film: On Audiovisual Stagings of Political Change (de Gruyter, 2022) focuses on the relationship between the theory of political revolutions and movies that depict revolutions. It explores how audiovisual stagings enable the spectator to enhance the notions of political change. He is a co-editor of the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism / Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (to be published in 2025 at Wallstein). He has published on German film history and on Hannah Arendt.  

Research & Teaching Interests: Film theory; German film history; genocide and Holocaust studies; Hannah Arendt; political theory; theories of revolution. 

Assistant Professor of Film and Media Production

Rowena Pedrena is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning television producer with more than a decade of experience in scripted, reality, and documentary formats for feature films and television. Her credits include work featured on Netflix, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNBC, PBS, TLC, History Channel, NatGeo, Hearst Television, Food Network, and Discovery Channel. 
 
Prior to joining the University, Rowena was the Supervising Producer for Hearst Television’s streaming app, Very Local, where she developed and produced unscripted original series and delivered 80+ episodes of half-hour broadcast television focused around the 26 Hearst local news markets. Rowena specifically developed shows in the following genres: hosted travel & tourism, restaurant profiles, food competition, renovation, action/adventure, human interest, and love & dating. 

As a multi-hyphenate artist (Writer/Producer/Director) her creative research lives at the intersection of unscripted and scripted media, applying scripted artistic techniques to elevate the unscripted form. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Rachel Catlett is a Humanities PhD student. Her research interests include horror and genre studies with a particular focus on feminist and psychoanalytic film theory. Her current research focuses primarily on the Lacanian Gaze and jouissance in both horror cinema and digital games. Rachel’s previous popular writing on television, film, and video games has appeared on Kill Screen and The Mary Jane, among others. Rachel’s dissertation project centers on jouissance as a means of creating new forms of being for women and queer spectators in contemporary feminist horror films.

Research & Teaching Interests: Feminist film theory; film genres; horror in cinema and digital games; psychoanalysis; queer theory

PhD Candidate, Teaching Assistant

Abby Cole is a PhD student in the Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her work draws on feminist STS, digital culture studies, and documentary studies to explore the ways media and technology shape narratives, and social and cultural behaviors. Currently, her research focuses on emerging journalism practices with a specific interest in social justice and artificial intelligence.

Research & Teaching Interests: Documentary studies; feminist theory; digital culture studies

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

After graduating from Texas Tech with an undergraduate degree in Agriculture, Dalton Cooper decided to make a change and begin studying film. He graduated with a MA in Media Industry and Critical Studies from University of North Texas and began his PhD work at UT Dallas. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Kingmaker: How Henry G. Saperstein Created the Godzilla Franchise in America,” which discusses the producer and merchandise director who brought Godzilla to the United States. Aside from his academic work, he is also a musician, filmmaker, and gardener.

Research & Teaching Interests: Kaiju cinema; science fiction cinema; horror cinema; transnational cinema; media franchises; media merchandising

PhD Student, Teaching Associate

Amine Faali is a second-year PhD student in the Visual and Performing Arts program, with a concentration on film studies. His research interests include Arab and North African cinema, documentary studies, and film production. In the academic year of 2024-2025, he served as a teaching assistant of Understanding Film with professor Caitlin Miles, and he is currently the primary instructor of Transnational Film and Video. Coming from a film production background, Faali is also a narrative and documentary filmmaker and editor. His short films have been screened at international film festivals such as the 15th Charlotte Black Film Festival, 30th Festival International du Cinéma d’Auteur de Rabat, and the 4th Women’s Independent Film & Television Festival. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Ahmad Khoshniat is an Iranian independent filmmaker, artist, and researcher whose practice bridges experimental animation and filmmaking with dissident cinema, drawing from both narrative and experimental traditions. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas. His short films and artworks have been officially selected, screened, and, in some cases, awarded at international film festivals. Through both theory and practice, his work examines how cinematic form can carry political and emotional resonance within and beyond narrative structures. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Mazyar Mahan is a Teaching Associate and Ph.D. Candidate in the Visual and Performing Arts program. He teaches courses on transnational cinema, understanding film, and global art cinema. Mazyar’s dissertation focuses on the films made by Iranian expatriate filmmakers over the past decade. His academic work has appeared in journals and edited volumes, including Mise-en-scène, The Spectator, and the Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media. Mazyar is also one of the editors of the forthcoming volume, ReFocus: The Films of Shirin Neshat, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. 

Research & Teaching Interests: World cinema; global art cinema; national and transnational cinemas; diasporic filmmaking; women’s cinema; contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Maureen Okwulogu holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Creative Arts, specializing in Theatre, from the University of Lagos, where she was recognized with the Teaching Assistant Award as the best graduating student. She is currently a Teaching Associate at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual and Performing Arts. Maureen’s research spans World Cinema, Transnational Cinema, Global Film Distribution, and Nigerian Cinema, with a particular interest in the commercial life of films, examining how movies circulate across global markets, reach diverse audiences, and generate cultural and economic impact after production. Through her work, she explores how films are received, consumed, and valued both commercially and culturally, connecting production practices with audience engagement and industry dynamics. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Mohammad Kasifur Rahman aka Kasif Rahman is a Teaching Associate and PhD candidate in Arts Technology and Emerging Communication program in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. His research interests include Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender and Women Studies, Digital Humanities, and Surveillance Studies. He is currently researching on the logistics of “technological rubbish” that travels from the global North to South. His doctoral dissertation focuses on how discourses about technological rubbish from Bangladesh in the form of ship junks chart the global trajectory of e-waste in the present time. He is serving as the Humanities Team Lead in the Migrant Steps Project, a project that intends to intervene in popular narratives about migration, countering media rhetorics of xenophobia and racism, by mobilizing walking as a tool for embodied reflection. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Assistant

Manjima Tarafdar is a Ph.D. student in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas. She completed her undergraduate degree in German Language and Literature at Visva-Bharati University and earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. She later pursued an M.A. in Film and Media Studies at Chapman University. Her research interests include gender studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, media and cultural studies, and transnational cinema, with a focus on identity, representation, and global media cultures. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative. 

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Brecken Hunter Wellborn’s in-progress dissertation, Millennial Pop Camp: Gay Politics and Hollywood Genre Films of the 1990s and 2000s, explores the queerly anti-normative politics of ostensibly normative mainstream films like Scream (1996) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). This fall, he is teaching Film Authorship: Queer(ed) US Cinema, a new, upper-division undergraduate course that provides students with the tools to reconsider what defines a “queer film.” His academic research has appeared in The Popular Culture Studies Journal and The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, Fandom from Bloomsbury Academic; his popular film and television commentary has appeared on Collider.com. 

Research & Teaching Interests: Gender & sexuality; camp; film genres; audiences & fandoms