Joel Neville Anderson is a scholar and curator of cinema and media with a focus on experimental documentary, community media, digital culture, and environmental and disability justice. His current projects include co-authoring a book on the filmmaking partnership of Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi witnessing alongside political movements, and a monograph on forces shaping people’s self-documentation of everyday environments and the artists and amateurs creating alternatives to extractive images. Dr. Anderson’s writing appears in Studies in Documentary Film, Millennium Film Journal, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Senses of Cinema, Film on the Faultline, and the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema. He served as Managing Editor and Editorial Board Member of InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture and co-produced The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies podcast. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Flaherty Seminar, and Signal Culture. He programmed JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film, the largest festival of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America, where he worked for over a decade, and was recognized with a Student Engagement Award for coordinating a faculty and student-curated weekly campus screening series. Dr. Anderson is an invited speaker at universities and academic conferences including Visible Evidence and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and has served as an educator at media arts nonprofits including Downtown Community Television Center, Museum of the Moving Image, and the Jacob Burns Film Center. He has held academic appointments at Ithaca College, SUNY, and The New School. He earned a PhD and MA in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and BFA in Film from Purchase College, State University of New York. He lives in New York City.

Interviews & Select Media Appearances

2025.5.13: Ithaca Week: “Media art fosters connection”
2019.10.9: Purchase Phoenix: “New Faculty Profile: Joel Neville Anderson”
2015.7.10: Research Connections at the University of Rochester: “UR PhD student helps reshape JAPAN CUTS film festival”
2015.7.3: The New York Times: “JAPAN CUTS Film Festival at Japan Society Emphasizes the Eccentric” (open access)
2014.7.30: Pacific Arts Movement: “Fest Talk With Brian Hu: Joel Neville Anderson, JAPAN CUTS”
2014.7.10: Video essay on Momoko Ando’s 0.5mm at JAPAN CUTS 2014