Emma Ben Ayoun, PhD
Dubinsky Center, Room AX16
Education
BA, McGill University
PhD, University of Southern California
Biography
Dr. Ben Ayoun is a film historian and theorist whose work has been published in a number of academic journals, digital publications, and edited collections. She writes about a wide range of topics, including disability justice, virtual reality, animal studies, experimental documentary, color, and slow cinema. At FIT, Dr. Ben Ayoun teaches classes on sexuality in cinema, film theory and criticism, disability media, and new wave cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan, among others.
Research Interests
Disability studies; film theory; film philosophy; queer & feminist theory; experimental cinema; documentary film; histories of science & medicine
Selected Publications
“Toward a theory of the hard-to-watch,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Forthcoming, Fall 2026.
“On the Verge,” Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Body, ed. Louis Bayman and Davina Quinlan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).
“At the Center of a Thing You’re Absent From: Emma Ben Ayoun with Jordan Lord,” World Records Journal vol. 9 (Fall 2025).
“The Impossible Temporality of Revolution and Cinema in Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et Ailleurs,” Senses of Cinema issue 113 (Spring 2025). Co-authored with Suja Sawafta.
“Theorizing a Future for Disability Media Studies: A Roundtable,” Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism 43:2 (Fall 2023). With Neta Alexander, Pooja Rangan, and Tanya Titchkosky.
“Bodies in water: disability cinemas and creatures of the sea,” Camera Obscura vol. 37 no. 3 (Fall 2022).
Selected Conference Presentations
“Dying (1976) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022): The Fabric and Fabrication of Illness and Death in Documentary Cinema,” Visible Evidence, August 2025.
“Diminishing returns: illness, disability, and repetition in the films of Tsai Ming-liang,” Screen, June 2025; Film-Philosophy, June 2025.
“Visceral Experience: Bodily Transgression in Talk to Her (2002) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022),” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, March 2024.
“Disability Documentary and the Endless Return,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, April 2023.
“Time beyond time: disability, documentary, history,” Visible Evidence, August 2022.
Awards
SUNY Accessibility Allies and Advocates Fellowship, 2026
Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Southern California, 2022-2023
Southern California, 202Annenberg Fellowship, University of Southern California, 2015-2020
Courses
- FI 231 History of Documentary Film
- FI 321 Film Theory and Criticism
- FI 302 Film Authors: Wong Kar-Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang
- FI 304 Disability and the Moving Image
- FI 323 Sexuality in Cinema