Ellen Scott, assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, has been named a 2016 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Since 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program supports and recognizes significant strides in film scholarship and annually awards grants totaling $550,000 to film scholars, cultural organizations and film festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Scott will receive $25,000 from the academy’s Educational Grants Committee based on her proposal. Donna Kornhaber, an assistant professor in English from the University of Texas, Austin, was also named an Academy Film Scholar. 

Scott's project, “Cinema’s Peculiar Institution,” is the first comprehensive film-centered study exploring the representation of slavery in American cinema. The work emphasizes repression as much as it does representation by focusing on female screenwriters in the early years of American cinema and the classical Hollywood period, a time of intensifying civil rights struggles.

 “Both [Donna] Kornhaber and Scott are brilliant scholars who will bring their expertise to these important but underserved topics,” said Academy Grants Committee Chair Buffy Shutt. “Their unique perspectives will help illuminate and support the Academy’s mission and we’re thrilled to be supporting them.  We all look forward to seeing the fruits of their research once they have completed their projects.”

Scott specializes in film, media and sound theory as well as the history of media, censorship, American film and African-American culture. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship and the Mellon Career Enhancement Fellowship. Scott focuses her research on the cultural meanings and aftershocks of film in African American communities and, more broadly, the relationship of media to the struggle for racial justice and equality. In 2015 she published her first book, “Cinema Civil Rights” (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and continues to teach a range of courses at UCLA.

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