The Motion Picture Academy announces its 2021 film scholars

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled its list of 2021 Academy Film Scholars. Authors and university professors Samantha N. Sheppard and J.E. Smyth were announced as this year’s recipients of the grant that is presented annually by the organization to established scholars whose projects are focused on an aspect of filmmaking and the film industry.

The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee will award Sheppard and Smyth $25,000 each for their proposals. While Sheppard will write ‘A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women’s Media Histories’, Smyth will write ‘Maisie: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Woman’. The latter is a biography of the first female Screen Writers Guild president Mary C. McCall Jr. Find out all Oscar news here.

These two will join 14 other Academy Film Scholars who are currently working on projects and 21 other scholars whose works have been published.
 
J.E. Smyth is a professor at the University of Warwick in the UK. She is the author of books including Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood and is a contributing writer at Cineaste. 

Samantha Sheppard is an associate professor at Cornell University and author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen.