Terri Francis will write Make that Art! Kevin Jerome Everson’s Body of Work, the first comprehensive monograph on the roughly 200 films produced by Kevin Jerome Everson over the first 20 years of his career. Francis will take into account the physicality of Everson’s cinema as it is situated in the real world and played out in real time, deploying duration, pause, repetition, aimlessness, and non-plot to produce trance-like sensations in viewers. Francis’s study will pay specific attention to how the body is made and remade through Everson’s representations of work, repetition, and leisure.
Terri Francis is associate professor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami and the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (Indiana University Press, 2021). Her art writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs as well as the publications Another Gaze, Bitch, Seen, Directed by Women, Lithub, Salon, and Shadow and Act. Her writing about black performance, film, and the conundrums of black representation has been featured in the academic journals Film History, Black Camera, Transition, Feminist Media Histories, ASAP, and Film Quarterly. From 2017–21 Francis directed the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University and secured the donation of African filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s written archive in addition to curating several film series, including Race Swap, Black Sun/White Moon and Love! I’m in Love!, and hosting several speakers series. With Betsy Stirratt she co-curated and published the catalog for the film installation Rough and Unequal: A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson. As a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Francis edited the open-access dossier Film Programming as Social Justice Work in the Wake of Covid-19, featuring essays from programmers about their work during the summer of 2020.