FMS Colloquium Lecture Series: Samantha Noelle Sheppard, “‘Was She Seeking Cinema?’: Tisa Bryant’s Phantom Cinemas”, Inaugural Event in the Annual Gaylyn Studlar Lecture Series

 In this talk I explore how writer and visual artist Tisa Bryant’s The Curator exemplifies what I theorize as phantom cinema: a Black feminist mode of cinematic thought and cultural production that intervenes in film history not by recovering lost films but by speculatively inhabiting the conditions of their absence. Reading The Curator alongside Bryant’s broader literary and cinematic practice, I show how phantom cinemas operate as both historiographic method and aesthetic strategy—one that renders gaps in Black women’s film history newly perceptible while resisting the archival logics that demand verification, completeness, or visual proof.