Scholarship

Graduate Studies

I am currently a PhD Candidate in Media Studies/American Studies in the School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.  Though I am enrolled at 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: American Experimental Cinema in the Public Sphere, 1986-1996.  My work, which includes both a written dissertation and video essays, examines the controversial responses of governments, institutions, and individuals to the exhibition of American experimental cinema during the so-called "culture wars" of that period.

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.

Graduate Studies

"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 (selected)

"The Kuchar Incident," NECSUS-The European Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Autumn, 2025.

"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).

“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.

Personal Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/willdigravio.

Curatorial Work (selected)

"Expanded Screens: The Video Essay," a four-part series of video essays co-curated at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York City, January 2025.