Eli Boonin-Vail is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His work focuses on American cinemas, Hollywood and independent, in their relationship to incarceration. This emphasis on the carceral entails research into collaborations between the studio system and the Prison Industrial Complex, as well as into how the political economy of racialized accumulation by dispossession wrought by mass incarceration affects and can be seen in independent filmmaking. His work can be found or is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journals Animation Studies, Inks, Film Criticism, French Screen Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, and in the edited collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in Early Comics, 1900 – 1960.

Statement: “The Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop was a hinge point moment in my career as a graduate student. It was where I encountered other scholars who not only thought deeply about visual culture and abolition but also pushed me to better understand my own project’s stakes and commitments.”