IREASHIA

Ireashia M. Bennett is a filmmaker and media scholar who works within four inter-related capacities in film and media studies–filmmaking, film scholarship/criticism, film programming, and film professorship. Some of their short experimental films and personal documentaries highlight the complexity of Black queerness, disability and madness as spiritual resistance against white supremacy while other works explore the materiality and function of celluloid film to mediate spiritual transmigration, spectrality, and wake work–concepts that allow them to use filmmaking as a form of spiritual memory work and spectral justice. They view the classroom as a liberatory space for students to respond to films and film history canon with nuanced criticality and political inquiry that strengthens the role cinema has in shifting unhealthy political and social paradigms. Their upcoming short documentary, Backcountry, Red Clay: Bloodline documents their family’s history in Edgefield County, SC and the family’s migration South after a tragic family death in their hometown of Prince George’s County, MD.

They are a recipient of the two-year RaD Lab + Outside the Walls fellowship at Threewalls and the SPARK Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition. Their artistic roots are in Chicago, where their creative work has been exhibited in art spaces such as the Sullivan Galleries, Arts Incubator, Stony Island Arts Bank, and the Chicago Art Department in Chicago.

They earned a B.A. in Journalism from Columbia College Chicago and are pursuing an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. They currently work as the Visuals Editor at Sixty Inches From Center, Philadelphia Artist Spotlight Fellow at cinéSPEAK Journal, and the Co-Director of the Diamond Screen Film Festival at Temple University.

In their free time, they write about films on their Substack, Welcome to The Z Axis.