Scholarship
Scholarship
Embedded Files
Below includes information on my ongoing graduate studies, work on videographic criticism (including The Video Essay Podcast), and information on my academic publications and appeareances.
Graduate Work
I am currently a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Media Studies, in the School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Though I maintain an affiliation with the university, I live in New York City and and work full-time while completing my degree.
My dissertation holds the working title, Won't Even Describe: Queer American Experimental Cinema in the Public Sphere, 1986-1996. My work, which includes both writing and video essays, examines the controversial responses of governments, institutions, and individuals to the exhibition of American experimental cinema.
I am currently at work on a chapter on documentarian Marlon Riggs, whose film Tongues Untied (1989) and its broadcast on PBS became the subject of controversy during the 1992 Republican Presidential Primary. My most recently completed chapter centers on the screening of George Kuchar's Weather Diary 1 (1986) at the 1996 Flaherty Film Seminar.
In 2020, I earned an M.Phil (with Distinction) in Film & Screen Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge, where I studied as a Keasbey Scholar. My thesis centered on the aesthetics of Hollywood films that depict the 2008 financial crisis.
Videographic Criticism
"Just as Jonas Mekas’s early Village Voice columns helped promote avant-garde accomplishment, Will DiGravio’s video essay podcasts are bringing increased attention to many video-essayists and their work." - Scott MacDonald in Comprehending Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Since 2019, much of my work has focused on the history and promotion of the video essay as a form of media scholarship and critical practice. I have lectured, taught courses, hosted workshops, and curated screenings of videographic work at universities, film festivals, and conferences throughout the United States and Europe.
My primary vehicle for the study of video essays has been The Video Essay Podcast, through which I have interviewed dozens of scholars, critics, and filmmakers about their work, and about found footage practices more generally.
The podcast has grown to become a hub for videographic practice, facilitating group projects, publishing written works, and partnering with festivals for live events and conversations. In 2020, Kevin B. Lee, Cydnii Wilde Harris, and myself, through the podcast's website, published the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist, a communal effort that went on to be screened at film festivals and was named the best video essay project of the year by Sight & Sound.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Work
"Fred Astaire’s Cane Hits My Brain," in "The Personal Mediascape in the Age of Videographic Heterotopias," ASAP/Journal (Journal of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present), 2024.
"The Sacred Text: Adapting Bordwell’s Cinephilia," Tecmerin, 13.1, 2024. (Available in English & Spanish).
Other Work
“Against Polish or, Notes on Videographic Labor or, You Could Remix Blazing Saddles Today,” ZfM: Zeitschrift für Medienwisschenschaft, Videography Issue #2, September 2023.
“Dean Martin is Calm,” Tecmerin, “Screen Stars Dictionary,” No. 11 2023 (1).
“On Collaborative Videographic Criticism & The Myth of John Adams,” Critical Studies in Television Online, June 2022.
More Video Essay Projects
Rio Bravo Diary. 365 tweets. (Dec. 2020 - Dec. 2021)
Divided Howard Hawks’ 1959 film into 365 equal parts, watched over the course of one year and chronicled the journey via Twitter. Created several video essays from tweets.
Named by multiple voters to the 2021 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
Online at www.riobravodiary.com
Bid Up (2022)
Named to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
Screened at the Cary Comes Home Festival (2022)
Sharing Stories: On Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021) 11 min.
Commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for Critics' Choice VII: On Positionality to accompany the screening of Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021)
One of two video essays commissoned, the other, seeing through Feast, is available via the IFFR website.
The Barber Approves (2019)
Named to the 2019 Sight & Sound poll of the year's best video essays
"A small, fleeting and seemingly insignificant gesture at the border of one of film history’s most beloved classics is unfolded and spread out into the grand coordinates of this film and Western movies in general." - Johannes Binotto
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