Jasmine Nadua Trice

Drawing insights from diverse critical fields such as film and media studies, theories of space and place, and cultural studies, Jasmine Nadua Trice’s work engages with film aesthetics, industries, production cultures and reception. She has written on Southeast Asian women filmmakers, ethnoburban multiplexes, production subcultures in Los Angeles, visual culture and embodiment in colonial Manila, and the relationship between film practice and theory.

Her first book, City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila’s Alternative Film Culture (Duke University Press, 2021) examines the politics of cinema circulation in early-2000s Manila, Philippines, a moment of profound technological and industrial transition. Employing theories of public culture, urban studies and Philippine cultural studies, the book traces Manila’s post-millennial cinema landscape by focusing on the primary locations of film exhibition and distribution: the pirated DVD district, mall multiplexes, art-house cinemas, the university film institute and state-sponsored cinematheques. In the wake of digital media piracy and the decline of the local commercial film industry, the rising independent cinema movement had been a site of contestation between filmmakers and the state, each constructing different notions of a prospective, national public film audience. The book includes a digital companion site, which maps a selection of shooting sites and exhibition spaces throughout Manila.

Trice is currently working on a second book on film organizing in Southeast Asia, co-authored with Dr. Philippa Lovatt of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. This book grew out of a curatorial project undertaken between 2016 to 2018, in collaboration with the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas (ASEAC). Trice was co-investigator of a four-country research network funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.), the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network: Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice. The network aimed to create spaces for the exchange of ideas among scholars, students, filmmakers, curators, archivists and the general public. As a means of continuing this project and its commitments to public-facing film research, Trice has created an online portal to share oral histories of film practice in Southeast Asia.

She has published in academic journals such as the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema, The Projector: A Journal of Film, Media, and Culture and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Other essays have appeared in Sinekultura Film Journal, In Media Res, Cinemas of Asia: Journal of the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, and the National Museum of Singapore’s Cinematheque Quarterly.

Trice has received numerous fellowships and awards to support her work, including a Hellman Fellowship, a Faculty Career Development Award, a Council on Academic Research Grant, a Dean’s Vision Fund Award, an Asian Cultural Council grant, and an American Association for University Women fellowship. Her dissertation received an Honorable Mention from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.

Trice is committed to teaching, mentorship and service both within and beyond her home department of Film, Television and Digital Media. She has taught classes on histories of exhibition and moviegoing, media studies approaches to space and place, transnational media industry studies, Southeast Asian film and video cultures, and Asian urbanism on screen. Before joining UCLA, Trice taught at the National University of Singapore, where she received the Annual Teaching Excellence Award. She has served as the co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC) at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and she is on the organizing committee for the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas.