Jasmyn R. Castro is a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies program of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Digital Asset Manager for the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. In 2014, she created the African American Home Movie Archive (AAHMA), an online index of African American home movie collections throughout the United States, in order to aid streamlined access to nontheatrical film collections and encourage the incorporation of these films in interdisciplinary scholarship. Her chapter, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent,” was published as part of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, a volume that reevaluates assumptions about American film culture and race’s place within it. Currently, she is exploring the intersection of gender, race, and media labor through her forthcoming article, A License to Project: Black Female Projectionists and "Men's Work" in the US Women's Army Corps, which will appear in the Spring 2025 issue of Feminist Media Histories (University of California Press). Her doctoral dissertation examines the activist origins of Black film and television practitioners during the first half of the twentieth century.

Research interests: access, archival film studies, Black film and television history, neglected and marginalized histories, self-documentation, and representation.