Dr Jenny Chamarette

Professional biography

• disability, gender, race and social justice in film, screen/lens-based media and artist's moving image
• digital humanities: AI, digital technologies, transformative justice and grassroots activism
• museums, archives and digital preservation
• phenomenology and embodiment
• queer ecologies and eco-criticism
• compassionate, enquiry-led film curation and programming
• creative-critical and art-writing across text and moving image

I am an interdisciplinary researcher of visual cultures who has always been interested in bodies. How and why bodies matter, which bodies are considered to 'fit' and which aren't, who holds power over bodies (human and otherwise) and how we come to know the world through our bodies, are always my starting questions, in one form or another. 

As Co-Investigator on the flagship Digital Humanities AHRC-funded project The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin's Personal Cinema (£970,000, 2018-2022), which was an inaugural case study for the University of Reading Digital Humanities Hub. Our team of artists, archivists, film and art historians, information and data scientists and computer scientists developed an innovative "360 degree" analysis of the digital and non-digital archive of the Brooklyn-born, diasporic Jewish, disabled artist-polymath Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012). I wrote about Dwoskin's controversial, genderqueer performances and digital activism on- and off-camera for journals like MIRAJ, Film Quarterly and Jewish Film and New Media, and collaborated with data scientists and computer scientists to develop data visualisations and AI models that would better facilitate access to the sensitive content of Dwoskin's digital archive, and to longitudinal studies of Dwoskin's filmmaking. My role also lead to new innovations in accessible experimental film curation at the LUX and BFI. With former PI Professor Rachel Garfield I am co-editing a critical anthology about Dwoskin, forthcoming with the BFI in 2025. With Rachel and Dr Melanie Jackson at the Royal College of Art, I am currently developing I Am A Cultural Asset, a bid for AHRC follow-on funding to facilitate self-lead artist organisations marginalised though lived experience of class, race and disability to develop sustainably via knowledge and skillsharing.

My second monograph, Museums and the Moving Image: Cine-museology, Cultural Politics, Film is forthcoming with Bloomsbury, and tracks the cultural, political and philosophical influence of moving images (performance documentation, video art, documentary and screen media) on public museums from the mid-20th century to the present day. 

In my curatorial practice, for the last few years I have co-developed a compassionate, care-led project called How Do You Feel Cinema, with Creative Director Gaylene Gould. Funded by Research England, the BFI, and the University of Reading, the project uses participatory, embodied and co-creative methods to create warm, inclusive, hospitable spaces where cultural leaders and audiences can better understand their own feelings about film, each other, and the wider world. 

Lastly, I am a writer of creative non-fiction. My queer ecological project on the cultural history of queerness in botany, horticulture and visual art, Q is for Garden, was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize and an extract was shortlisted for the Nature Chronicles Prize and published in an anthology by Saraband in 2022. In 2023 I was selected as a mentor for an emerging writer via the Ruppin Agency and the Lucy Writers Platform Arts-Council funded project, What The Water Gave Us. My memoir essay on diaspora, water and intergenerational trauma was published in an anthology by Takeaway Press. In June 2024 my essay on ecological intimacy, grief and land rights was published in THIS ALLOTMENT, an anthology edited by Sarah Rigby at Elliott and Thompson. 

• feminist and compassionate pedagogies
• embracing vulnerability and difference in the classroom
• equity, inclusion and advocacy in the screen industries
• essay film, documentary, hybrid and found-footage filmmaking
• independent cinema and artist's moving image
• curation, programming and film education
• archives, preservation, museums and galleries 

I work regularly as a consultant, curator and expert for galleries, film institutions, and the creative industries.

Recent examples of my impact-generating work outside academia:

2023:

• ‘Criptörök’, commissioned fiction on digital access labour for Minderoo Centre, CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Co-produced with Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham
• How Do You Feel Cinema: An inclusive care-led training toolkit for feeling film. Presented at Independent Cinema Office Screening Days for inclusion, Storyhouse, Chester
• Art-writing on Milda Januseviciute’s short films in Beholding Relations: An Exploration of Disability, Oppression and Liberation, curated by Yates Norton and David Ruebain

2022:

• Co-Curator, From NY Underground to London Artist Moving Image, short films by Stephen Dwoskin, e-flux screening rooms, Brooklyn NY, with Rachel Garfield & Mara Mills
• Curatorial team member for Experimenta Focus: Stephen Dwoskin, BFI with William Fowler, Rachel Garfield, Henry K Miller. Screenings, book discussion & study day
• Invited contributor, The Greatest Films of All Time, once-a-decade poll, Sight and Sound

2021: 

• Dwoskin, Disability And…. Curator, series of online, accessible screenings at the LUX of films by Stephen Dwoskin with Q&A from artists and cultural practitioners. Invited speakers include: David Ruebain, Yates Norton, P. Staff, Robert Andy Coombes
• Panel member, BBC Wales Diversity Training Day for Producers (online)
• Commissioned researcher for Raising Films research report How We Work Now: Learning from the Impact of COVID to Build an Industry that Works for Parents and Carers. Funded by BFI, Screen Scotland, Screen Industries Growth Network, Writers Guild of Great Britain, BECTU)

• I provide consultancy and training for a range of UK universities and research organisations, supporting early and mid-career researchers through coaching, self-leadership, sustainable writing practices, and compassion-focussed personal development. Previous clients include: Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Oxford Brookes, University of the West of England, and Bath Spa University, National Centre for the Replacement Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3RS).
• Mentor with the UKRI Future Leadership Fellows Development Network.
• How Do You Feel Cinema? co-developed with Gaylene Gould, Creative Director and Artist and former Head of Cinemas at the BFI (funded by Research England, University of Reading, BFI, Independent Cinema Office) (ongoing)
• Funded by Clore Leadership, supervised Gaylene's research on Restorative Care Practices for Global Majority Cultural Leaders (2022-3)
• Access consultant for Royal College of Art project I Am A Cultural Asset, designing toolkits for best collaborative practice with self-organised artist collectives, with Professor Rachel Garfield and Dr Melanie Jackson (2023-4)
• In collaboration with Aimi Hamraie (Vanderbilt University), Tim Barker (University of Glasgow) and Louise Hickman (Minderoo Centre, University of Cambridge), I am developing DIGI-DIS: Digitality and Disability (value c. £900,000) a 3-year, multi-partner research bid with an international leadership team of disabled researchers in digital technologies, film, universal design, and cultural anthropology. Adopting models of leadership by the most affected, the project bid will co-create digital tools with global disabled creative practitioners, developing inclusive digital policy for wider social, cultural and economic post-COVID recovery in line with UN Sustainable Development Goals.

• Imprint Director with Anna Backman Rogers at MAI Press, imprint of US-based Open Access publisher, Punctum
• Visiting researcher at GPS400: Centre for Collaborative Visual Research, University of Gothenburg