Dr Jessica Boyall (She/ her)

Dr Jessica Boyall is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project "Women’s Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible". Based at the British Film Institute, she is developing feminist methodologies for cataloguing the collections of leading women filmmakers, including Gurinder Chadha and Tina Gharavi.

She completed her AHRC-funded PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2025, writing her thesis on the role and representation of women in the British Black Workshops. Before joining the University of Exeter, she was a Visiting Lecturer in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, a Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin and a Research Assistant at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has also worked, in a curatorial capacity, at several community-focused organisations including, most recently, Ormside Projects in London.

Broadly speaking, Jessica is interested in the histories and aesthetics of experimental film and digital culture, the intersections of art and the moving image, feminist approaches to film history and archival theory and practice. Her writing about these subjects has appeared in numerous academic journals as well as public-facing contexts. Recent publications include an essay about Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (forthcoming as part of the BFI’s Blu-ray release); an article on digital approaches to depicting ecological violence (published in Afterimage); a comparative study of Amber Film and Photography Collective’s and Berwick Street Film Collective’s representations of working-class culture (published in the Open Library of Humanities Journal) and a profile of Italy’s first female documentary maker, Cecilia Mangini (published in the New Left Review - Sidecar).

She has curated a number of film-related programmes, including the Arts Council-funded exhibition Step Forward: Sonic Visions (curated on behalf of London Community Video Archive) and contributed to moving-image projects such as the Virtual Reality documentary Off the Record (produced by NoGhost) which, funded by StoryFutures, reactivated material from the BBC and BFI archives to celebrate British South Asians’ rich musical heritage.