Overview
Rejoice Abutsa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her research threads interdisciplinary knowledge and methods from Black Media Studies, Gender & Women Studies, Film Theory, and Digital Studies. In her doctoral dissertation, she reorients, reframes, and recalibrates the institutional, networked, and cultural labor of women workers in Nollywood, and broadly African cinema, arguing that these women loom large and are crucial innovators in the production and circulation of global black media.
As an instructor at Cornell University, she was awarded the Spring 2024 Spencer Prize from the Knight Institute, in recognition of her excellent preparatory and mentorship work that led to one of her students' rich and satisfying intellectual achievements in a submitted paper.
As a Chevening Scholar, Rejoice earned her master’s degree in Creative and Collaborative Enterprise at the University College London. Prior to that, she earned a double honors undergraduate degree in Theatre and Film Arts at the University of Jos.
At Cornell University, she organizes and curates Voices and Visions in Black Media: New Directions in Nollywood. For two academic years, Rejoice served as the co-chair of the Performing and Media Arts Speaker Series (PMAPS). She has also organized and participated in several industry-facing panels, including Nollywood Global Circuits with collaborators at Bournemouth University, Soyinka, Citizenship & The Moving Image at the Black Film Center & Archive, Indiana University; Bridging the Diaspora Gap at the Institute of African Studies, Emory University; and The Impact of VODs on African Film Productions at the Nollywood Film Week Paris; African Cinema in the Curricula at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival; as well as a post-screening discussant for The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).
Rejoice has published on the Journal of the African Cultural Studies and the Journal of the African Literature Association.
Rejoice worked in Nollywood and on films such as The Lost Café (2017), One Lagos Night (2021) and With Difficulty Comes Ease (2024), among many others.
In the news
- PMA Ph.D. Student Rejoice Abutsa Publishes Book Review in the Journal of the African Literature Association
- PMA Ph.D. Student Rejoice Abutsa Published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies
- "Nollywood Global Circuits" Led by PMA Graduate Student Rejoice Abutsa
- Film series: Voices & Visions in Black Media: Centering New Directions in Nollywood
- PMAPS Colloquium Explores the Stigma of Marginalization in Performing and Media Arts