Professor Jane M. Gaines Awarded International Institute of Film Science and Arts Fellowship
On September 20, 2026 the International Institute of Film Science and Arts (IIFSA) awarded Film and Media Studies Professor Jane M. Gaines a prestigious fellowship. The IIFSA was founded in 2024 to support ongoing academic research and practice in the cinematic arts, as well as preserving the heritage of the discipline. The Fellowship is the highest honor at the institute, acknowledging a cohort of distinguished film scholars and practitioners.
Gaines said she was “delighted” to receive the award: “This is especially gratifying because the award mentions my academic work on documentary film and media as well as research on silent era women who worked in the first film industries worldwide, that research is part of an early Digital Humanities innovation still supported by Columbia University Libraries: the Women Film Pioneers Project database. And it's a chance to put a spotlight on Film and Media Studies faculty and students in the School of the Arts.”
The WFPP was published through Columbia Libraries in 2013 and germinated from Gaines’s work as a visiting scholar at Vassar College in the 1990s. With her students, she amassed an archive of material on silent-era women, envisioning the publication of a book-set that challenged the narrative of the “great fathers” of cinema and addressed the lack of research on women directors, particularly in the early eras of film. Later, the archive became WFPP, a digital resource and publication intended to advance research on silent film era women who worked behind the camera as directors and in other roles like screenwriting and producing. The WFPP celebrated its 10th anniversary at the Museum of Modern Art in 2023 with a selection of lesser-known films, including Brides of the Frontier (1943), the only surviving film directed by Japanese filmmaker Tazuko Sakane, and Renee Oro’s documentary Las Naciones de América (1927).
Gaines is also a Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke and has authored several award-winning books—Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law (1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (2001), Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (2018). Pink-Slipped, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, traces several careers of women in the silent film era including actress Gene Gauntier and director Alice Guy Blaché. Gaines illustrates that these women held more positions of power at this time than any other in film history and conversely were not acknowledged in the feminist historiography of the 1970s.
Gaines’s academic articles have been published in numerous journals and she is currently working on a book titled What Happened?: Documentary Media & The Dilemmas of Historical Time. She received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Career Award in 2018 and in 2022 an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. The doctorate was awarded in April of 2020, but the ceremony was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and held at Stockholm City Hall on September 30, 2022.