JESSICA BALANZATEGUI

Jessica Balanzategui is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies in the Department of Media and Communication and a Chief Investigator in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. She teaches the unit Digital Cultures: Aesthetics, Markets, Industries in Postgraduate courses. Jessica's research examines screen genres, in particular horror and the Gothic, and genres for and about children. As part of these areas of focus, her widely published research illuminates how genre, storytelling, and aesthetics operate in digital cultures (such as YouTube, subscription video on demand services, and online scary storytelling cultures), and in tandem, the impacts of technological, industrial, and cultural change on screen genres and their audiences, including child audiences.

 

Jessica's work has been published in leading international journals including New Media and Society, The Journal of Visual Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Media International Australia and Studies in Australasian Cinema. Jessica was awarded the 2020 Australian Film Institute Research Fellowship to examine how Australian children's television genres have changed in accordance with industrial, technological, and policy developments.