Joanna Hearne

Professor Hearne's teaching and research center on Native American and global Indigenous media studies, archival recoveries of Indigenous presence in cinema history, and contemporary digital media, digital storytelling, and animation. She teaches courses on Global Indigenous Media, History of Animation, History of Documentary, the Short Film, and Westerns, as well as FMS core courses including Introduction to Film & Media, Film Theory, Film History I and II, and the Capstone. 

Her books argue for the centrality of Indigenous images and image-making to American film history. She is the author of Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising and the co-editor of the collection ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox. She also served as a guest editor for the May 2017 special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures on “Digital Indigenous Studies: Gender, Genre and New Media” and the Winter 2021 Journal of Cinema and Media Studies In-Focus dossier, “Indigenous Performance Networks: Media, Community, Activism.”

Before joining Film and Media Studies at OU, she taught for many years at the University of Missouri where she was the founding director of the Digital Storytelling B.A. degree program, a William T. Kemper Fellow for Teaching Excellence, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. In 2019 she served as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Culture and Society at the University of Alberta.