Janelle Rowsell

Janelle Rowsell (she/her/they) is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. She received both her BA and MA from Carleton University’s Film Studies program, where she primarily focused on Philippine and broader Southeast and East Asian cinema cultures. Her MA thesis examined the relationship between food and Philippine genre cinema from the 1970s Martial Law period to the late 2010s, highlighting the interconnectedness between food, film, and Filipino culture.

As a multiracial Filipino-Canadian scholar, her doctoral research aims to examine the mobility and mobilization of memory in nonfiction films by Filipino diaspora filmmakers, focusing on experimental nonfiction films by Filipino-Canadians. With an interdisciplinary approach to cinema studies, her primary research interests include decolonial approaches to audiovisual material and its pedagogy, Philippine cinema, experimental cinema, diaspora studies, corporeality, memory studies, queer and feminist theory, animation, and media translation.

In addition to her academic endeavours, she is currently working on a film project that curates home videos and photographs to explore grief, trauma, and our relationship to personhood through memory.

Selected Works

“Ghosts, Ghouls, and Girls in White: Colonial Allegories of Filipino Horror.” Scaffold, vol. 2, no. 1. pp. 13-29. 2025.

Curator, “What Is It Good For?: Experiences of War in Animation Part 1 & 2.” Ottawa International Animation Festival, 2024.

Awards

• Graduate Scholarship (2024, Carleton University)
• Graduate Scholarship in Film Studies (2023, Carleton University)
• Ottawa Film Society Scholarship for Film Studies (2019, Carleton University)
• Dean’s Honour List Award (2017, Carleton University) H
• enry Marshall Tory Scholarship (2017, Carleton University)
• 2016 President’s Scholarship (2016, Carleton University)