Kiki Loveday

Kiki Loveday is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and scholar working at the intersections of queer and feminist media historiographies. S/he works in multiple forms from scholarly essays to gallery-based installations. Kiki’s creative work has screened in venues from Union Docs in Brooklyn, NY to The Femmes Video Art Festival at the Situation Room and L.A.C.E. in Los Angeles, CA. Their scholarly work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Framework, the Women Film Pioneers Project, Early Popular Visual Culture, and is forthcoming in multiple anthologies.

Their current book project traces the historical emergence of the motion picture director through a series of Sappho films produced during the silent era (1900–31). This project has been supported by a prestigious President’s Fellowship at The University of California Santa Cruz, two Feminist Media History Initiative Fellowships, and an artist residency at The Huntington Library in Los Angeles in collaboration with the Feminist Center for Creative Work. It won The Society of Cinema and Media Studies dissertation award (2023) and a chapter won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Gender and Feminisms Caucus Graduate Student Writing Prize (2021).

Kiki’s research and teaching focus on femxle authorship, feminist, queer, intersectional and anti-racist historiographies and methodologies; the development of individual voice; and the creative process across theory and practice. S/he co-founded The Women in the Director’s Chair Oral History Project at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and currently serves on the steering committee of Women in Film History International.

Selected Publications

“Sapho Kiss: Queer Reproduction in Early Cinema (1896-1908),” Early Popular Visual Culture 21, no. 1 (2023): 32-72.

“Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses,”  Framework 63, no, 1 (2022): 36-61. Video available at: https://www.frameworknow.com/audio-visual/63-1-2

“The Kiss: Forgetting Film History,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (2022): 178-215.

“The Pioneer Paradigm,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 1 (2022): 165-180.

“Sister Acts: Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction," Framework 60, no. 2 (2019): 201-226.

“Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era." in Women Film Pioneers Project, eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019).