Prof. æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil joined the Cinema Studies Institute this time last year. In 2025/26, she is teaching CIN341H1F - Trans Cinema and Media and CIN440H1S - Non-Binary Media: Trans Genres, Trans Forms. We asked her to tell us a bit about herself.
What is your background in cinema? What are your areas of specialization, and what drew you to those areas?
My now-90-year-old Black gay maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were both huge film buffs growing up and unknowingly provided the foundation for my own continued interest in cinema. From my grandfather in particular I got my first lessons in queer camp long before I’d ever heard of Sontag, through him introducing me to the work of John Waters and his regular quoting of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. From my mother I got an early education in (cishet) romantic comedies and epic period dramas, with repeated viewings of everything from When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Brown Sugar, and Love Jones to The Color Purple (the 1985 version, of course, not whatever that 2023 version was) to name a few. With my father and his mother, anything Denzel Washington was starring in and/or that Spike Lee or Antoine Fuqua had directed became a family event. Though neither I nor they might have known it then, from all these elders I gained an early appreciation for cinema not only as a space where representations of race, gender and sexuality are always being negotiated and reified, but I also came to value it as a space of collectivity and communal gathering.
I then came to my areas of specialization from a few different seemingly divergent paths that honestly only later converged and became clearer to me in the past few years. I began university as a Theatre Arts major, and only later ended up double majoring in Gender and Women’s Studies and Media Arts/Film & Television Studies with a concentration in Sexualities and Queer Studies. I then got my Masters in American Studies, and I have an MFA in Documentary Media, which I completed concurrently with PhD in Black Studies, and certifications in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory. At every stage of my academic career, I have endeavored to bridge theory and practice, and in many ways, this is how I still try to approach film as both a maker and spectator. As an instructor, I encourage students to see the cinematic as an ideological and collaborative apparatus that simultaneously bears world-making and world-breaking power and potential for different populations.
My current research centrally considers how antiblackness coheres categories of difference dominantly organized by gender and sexuality through an examination of the racialized rhetorical devices, tropes, and narratives of transsexual and transgender authenticity represented within popular and public culture. I analyze how narrative and aesthetic strategies of colorblind ideology and trans normativity reveal the racial demarcations of cinematic and gendered processes from their inception, foregrounding their ability to create and cohere meaning and symbolic currency. Just as cinema was formatively/familially introduced to me as a space of active reflection and identification versus passive consumption, I continue to be interested in investigating the visual regimes that look to govern and further consolidate or constrain Black trans femme Being and becoming, and the means through which Black queer, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming folk attempt to circumvent this.
What are your top three favourite films of all time? Why?
I am generally reluctant to rank favourites for films, music or anything, really, as I often feel the ordering varies depending on my mood. But the following three films have each had a formative and profound influence on me and prompted repeated viewings, especially due to the ways they their structural commentaries on Blackness, racialized sexuality and gender formation are illustrated not just in terms of their content but in their respective formal and aesthetic challenges to genre conventions.
Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019)
A bonus, more recent “favourite” is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which I saw a total of five times while it was still screening in gorgeous IMAX 70mm. Safe to say I was a bit obsessed.
What films are you looking forward to seeing in the future?
Admittedly, as a former musical theatre kid, I am looking forward to seeing Wicked: For Good. Apart from nostalgia though, the casting of Cynthia Erivo and the reception of her Blackness in contrast to her predecessors in the role, has made renewed discourse around colorblind casting (for an ironically green-skinned witch, no less) interesting to watch unfold, as has people’s newfound racialized identification with her.
I’m also looking forward to seeing Weapons and Highest 2 Lowest.
Which is your favourite film festival?
I missed TIFF last year because I had just moved to Canada, so I'm excited to attend for the first time this year! But last year, I attended several different film festivals for the first time to screen my MFA thesis film, in the interval.
Some of my favorites were Prismatic Ground, MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the Oscars-qualifying New Orleans Film Festival where my film received the Jury Award for Best Experimental Short, making the experience especially meaningful. Each of these festivals were so thoughtfully and intentionally curated highlighting a range of exciting genre-defying Black, queer and trans of color work.
How was your first year in Toronto and at the University of Toronto?
My first-year teaching at the University of Toronto was exciting and edifying. I taught new courses, SDS381H1F - Intro to Trans Studies and CIN341H1F - Trans Cinema and Media, which I’m thrilled to teach again this fall.
For “Trans Cinema and Media” in particular, which I taught within CSI, we looked at the historical, cultural, & socio-political contexts and consequences of how trans & gender non-conforming people, experiences & narratives have been depicted onscreen from the ‘50s to now. As we screened so many films that informed my own cinematic sensibilities growing up, it was also so exciting to learn more from students’ perspectives and how they are consuming and experiencing the very different contemporary landscape of trans media today, as so much was and still is always actively unfolding every day in the world of (anti-) trans politics, legislation and cultural production.
My first year in Canada beautifully culminated with my participation in an artist residency/retreat last month convened by a friend and collaborator, Syrus Marcus Ware, where I was able to reconnect with my creative research film practice, experiment with other mediums, and collaborate with a dozen other QTBIPOC artists.
Tell us about your courses in 2025/26.
In addition to teaching SDS381H1F - Intro to Trans Studies and CIN341H1F - Trans Cinema and Media again this fall, I am teaching two new courses this year offered in the Winter term: CIN440H1S - Non-Binary Media: Trans Genres, Trans Forms offered within CSI and SDS246H1S - Queer and Trans Digital Media Studies offered under the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS).
In “Non-Binary Media: Trans Genres, Trans Forms” we’ll take a less identitarian approach to the question of who and what the subjects of trans studies and by extension trans cinema include. Where “Trans Cinema and Media” took a more or less historiographic approach to how trans representation has developed over the course of the mid-twentieth century to the present, this course will ask students to conceptualize transness not only as an identity, but as an alternative form of knowledge production, or as a methodology offering theories of being and becoming that can radically inform how genres of the category Human emerge. This advanced seminar meets genre theory and cultural criticism with experimental cinematic & media texts that challenge discrete classifications of race, gender, sexuality, narrative/fiction & documentary/non-fiction storytelling.
Alongside this, I will be teaching “Queer and Trans Digital Media Studies” for the first time, though it has been offered previously simply as Queer Digital Media. This class will look at the rapidly changing landscape of interactive new media, social networking, and online content among other mediums to interrogate how queer and trans identities and cultures are actively being (re)conceptualized and renegotiated on various kinds of screens.