Profile
Deirdre Boyle is a media historian, critic, curator, and psychotherapist. She is a Media Studies alum proud of her continuing relationship with the first graduate program in Media Studies in the United States. She is part of the Graduate Certificate in documentary studies faculty and served as the director from 2008-2012.
She has taught at New York University, Rutgers University, Fordham University, City College/CUNY as well as Moscow State University and, most recently, Izmir Economics University in Turkey. She has also lectured at Ryerson University, Toronto and Hong Kong Baptist University among other institutions.
She has written and edited eight books and numerous essays for such publications as Afterimage, CineAction, Cineaste, Film Quarterly, Frameworks, The Independent, Millennium Film Journal, Short Film Studies, and WideAngle, among others. Her current interests focus on death and media, which led to a second master’s degree in clinical social work. Her interest in trauma, grief, and loss informs her classes and research.
She has given scholarly papers at conferences and professional meetings around the world. She has served as an external reviewer, juror, peer reviewer, panelist and/or consultant for numerous institutions and has been a juror for national and international film festivals as well as for government funders and private foundations and non-profit organizations. She currently serves on the Peabody Award’s documentary committee. She has organized exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the USIA and American Film Institute, the Brussels Video Festival, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre, among others.
Boyle’s keynote address, “VT is not TV Forty Years Later,” has been translated into French and will appear in the forthcoming book Une télévision allumée: les arts dans le noir et blanc du tube cathodique. The essay honors her former New School colleague Paul Ryan whose iconic statement in Radical Software in 1970 became a theoretical pillar of early video theory and activism. She is the author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (OUP) and Video Classics: A Guide to Video Art and Documentary Tapes (Oryx), foundational texts in the history of early video in the United Sates.
She is currently writing a book on the work of a renowned Franco-Cambodian cinéaste and genocide survivor; it is tentatively titled Rithy Panh, Ferryman of Memory. In 2015 she traveled to Phnom Penh to interview him and attend the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia. In 2017 she traveled to Geneva to the International Human Rights Film Festival and Forum to view his new work and wrote an essay, which she delivered at the annual Visible Evidence conference for documentary scholars in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her essay appears in the Fall 2017 issue of Film Quarterly.
Recent Publications
Essays in books:
La vidéo n’est pas la télévision (VT is not TV Forty Years Later), Une télévision allumée: les arts
dans le noir et blanc du tube cathodique, ed. André Gaudréault and Viva Paci, Montréal: Presses Universitaire de Vincennes, forthcoming
Warrior to Warrior: Salomé Lamas, “No Man’s Land,” Salomé Lamas, Parafiction (Selected
Work 2010-2016), Mousse Publishing, 2016
Interviewing the Devil: Interrogating Masters of the Cambodian Genocide, A Companion to
Contemporary Documentary Film, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2015
Trauma, Memory, Documentary: Reenactments in Two Films by Rithy Panh and Garin
Nugroho, Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Sufferings, eds. Bhaskar
Sarkar and Janet Walker, AFI Film series, Routledge, 2010
Essays in journals:
‘We Refugees’: New Work in New Modes from Rithy Panh, Film Quarterly, Vol. 17 No. 1, 2017
On a Morality of Filmmaking: A Conversation with Rithy Panh and Deirdre Boyle, CineAction,
Winter 2016
Review: In Jackson Heights by Frederick Wiseman, Cineaste, Vol 41 No. 1, Winter 2016
Short Takes: Justine by Pratap Rughani, Cineaste, Vol. 41 No. 1, Winter 2016
Marking Time: The Long form Documentary at IDFA 2014, Film Quarterly, Vol. 40 No. 3,
Summer 2015
Confronting Ideology: An Interview with Rithy Panh and Marc Marder, Cineaste, Vol. 39 No. 3,
Summer 2014
Finding the Missing Picture: The Films of Rithy Panh, Cineaste, Vol. 39, No. 3, Summer 2014
Review: Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell, Cineaste Vol.30, no. 1, Winter 2014
No Place Like Home: The Cinema of Kamal Aljafari, by Deirdre Boyle and Marit Kathryn
Cornell, WuXia, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2013
Entering the Cave: Experiencing the Sublime in the Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky,
http://www.beyondkandinsky.net/Statements.html#DeirdreBoyle
Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Re-enactment in Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer
Rouge Killing Machine, Frameworks, Winter 2010
Undressing My Mother: death and film in rural Ireland, Short Film Studies, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2010
Review: Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary (review), Cineaste, Spring 2010
Research Interests
Global documentary
Southasian genocide and its media representations
History and memory
Death and media
Media consumption and the body
Awards And Honors
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The New School University's Distinguished Teaching Award
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John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
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Fulbright Fellowship
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Asian Cultural Council Fellowships
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Ace Award for Best Documentary Series on cable tv
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Writing fellowships at artist colonies: MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, UCross, Blue Mountain Center, The Millay Colony