Barbara Zecchi

Barbara Zecchi (Visual and Performance Studies) is Professor and Head of the Film Studies Program  at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a feminist film scholar, film festival curator, and video-essayist, specializing in Iberian and Latin American cinemas. She has taught at various universities across Europe and the U.S. lecturing as well as publishing on an extensive range of topics, such as women in film, feminist film theory, aging studies, and videographic criticism. In addition to over 100 articles and 90 video essays, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of 11 books, such as La pantalla sexuada (The Gendered Screen, Cátedra 2015) and Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas (Routledge, 2020, co-edited with Rebeca Maseda, and José María Gámez Fuentes), and Desenfocadas (Women Out of Focus, Icaria 2014), listed by the Spanish daily newspaper El Diario as one of 10 books that have defined a decade. She has organized international conferences as well as co-founded the international research network CinemAGEnder. She is the founder and director of the open access project "Gynocine: Women Filmmakers, Feminism, and Film Studies" she launched in 2011 —an online database with unique resources related to the works of women filmmakers around the world. In 2017, she was elected Associate Member of the Film Academy of Spain. A prolific video-essayist, her works have appeared in the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound lists of best video essays since 2021, and her Rhythms of Rage was the top vote getter in 2024.  
In 2023 she joined the editorial team of [in]Transition, the Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies. She talks about her research in “The Video Essay Podcast” (episode 31), and you can see her work here.