Samantha Noelle Sheppard

Overview

Dr. Samantha N. Sheppard is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Chair in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. 

She received her BA (cum laude) in Film & Television Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Dartmouth College and her MA and PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women's Studies from UCLA's Department of Gender Studies.  

Dr. Sheppard was named a Cornell Ivy+ Provost Leadership Fellow (2024-2025). She was also was the inaugural Mary Armstrong Meduski '80 Assistant Professor from 2017-2021. From 2017-2022, Dr. Sheppard was the Faculty Director of Cornell's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program. From 2019-2022, she was also the inaugural Associate Editor of Outreach and Equity for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, a role for which she, along with editorial team, received the 2023 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Sheppard is an award-winning scholar and teacher. She was the recipient of the 2021 Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, which recognizes faculty excellence in Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences. She was recognized by Cornell's Graduate School Office of Inclusion & Student Engagement with the 2025 Faculty Champion Award for Advanced Career Faculty, which honors faculty members who demonstrate exemplary mentorship, leadership, and outreach in fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and access within graduate and professional education.

Dr. Sheppard's research interests include Black cultural production and production cultures, African American representation in cinema, television studies, sports films, feminist media studies, embodiment studies, and critical race theory. She writes extensively on issues of race, gender, and representation in film, television, and digital media. She teaches courses on global cinema, sports films, contemporary television, African American film history, popular culture, women filmmakers, and blackness on screen.

She is author of The Basketball Film: A Cultural and Transmedia History (Rutgers University Press, "Screening Sports" series, November 10, 2026) and Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Women, Sisters, Friends: The Selected Plays and Screenplays of Kathleen Collins (forthcoming, University of California Press, 2027) with Alix Beeston and Hayley O'Malley, Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) with Travis Vogan, and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) with TreaAndrea Russworm and Karen Bowdre. 

She has published essays in Television & New Media, Feminist Media Histories, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, The Velvet Light Trap, Cinema Journal, Journal of Sport History, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Black Camera: An International Journal, and FLOW: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture alongside chapters in the anthologies Sports, Power, and Resistance (University of Illinois Press, 2026), L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015) and Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Indiana University Press, 2018). 

She has also written for The Atlantic, Flash Art International, Docalogue, Los Angeles Review of Books and Nike/Phaidon Press. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and she works as media consultant. Dr. Sheppard is on several editorial and advisory boards.

She is currently working on her third monograph titled A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women's Media Histories, a project for which she was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

She has been quoted in a range of popular press (The New York Times, Vox, BBC News, The Washington Post, Business Insider, NBC News, Miami News Press, and LA Weekly, among others) and featured in documentaries, on television programming, and several podcasts, including appearing as a special guest for Turner Classic Movie's Black History Month programming and Sunday Silent Nights alongside TCM host Jacqueline Stewart. 

To learn more about Dr. Sheppard and access her full CV, see her website: http://samanthansheppard.com