Eli Boonin-Vail

Eli Boonin-Vail is a Lecturer and the director of the Film Studies Minor at University at Albany, State University of New York. He teaches a variety of history, theory, and production courses in film and media, with a specialization in Black, Hollywood, and Documentary film and media as well as comics studies. His research currently focuses on American cinemas, Hollywood and independent, in their relationship to the prison industrial complex in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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, InMediaRes, and Music, Sound, and The Moving Image, as well as the edited collections Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in Early Comics, 1900 – 1960 and A Century of 16mm. Dr. Boonin-Vail also produces peer-reviewed videographic research using mixed media methods and enjoys teaching this approach to his students.