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Five video essays designed and produced by Barbara Zecchi, director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at UMass Amherst, appeared on the "Best Video Essays of 2021" list published by Sight & Sound, the prestigious monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). The list was generated through a poll of 30 video essayists, academics, critics, and filmmakers, and highlighted 120 recommendations. According to Zecchi, the video-essay is "a new aesthetic strategy that reshapes the scholarly discourse of film studies."

Zecchi's "A Fish with the Movie Camera: Lucrecia Martel’s Pescados as Metacinema," "TV Dictionary — Bron/Broen (II)," "TV Dictionary — Marcella," "The Black and White Coffee Set," and "Silence and Words: Voice-over and Trauma in Coixet & Campion" were among the 120 video essays featured on the BFI list. German video-essayist Evelyn Kreutzer (Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf) said of Zecchi's "Silence and Words: Voice-over and Trauma in Coixet & Campion" is "a powerful, deeply affective video on cinematic sound, specifically the transcendence of internal and external sound, experience and narration". Dutch cinema scholar Jaap Kooijman (University of Amsterdam) praised "The Black and White Coffee Set: Social/Racial Mobility in Ana Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta" for being "brilliant in its simplicity."

The list also featured a video-essay produced by Celia Sainz, one of Zecchi's graduate advisees. Zecchi's undergraduate research assistant Emily Su Bin Ko '22, a Film Studies major, is also mentioned as one of the emerging voices in the field.

Thanks to Zecchi's work in video-graphic criticism, the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Film Studies Program at UMass Amherst have been acknowledged as emerging hubs in this new field. The upcoming "The Videoessay: A Conference" co-organized by Barbara Zecchi and Daniel Pope and to be hosted at UMass Amherst in September 2022 will attract leading video-essayists from all over the world, and will address theory, practice, pedagogy, and future directions in field.