Welcome to Latino Media Arts & Studies
Latino Media Arts & Studies, or LMÁS, is a program of the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin with a three-fold mission: to support students interested in learning more about Latina/o/x-oriented and -produced film, television, journalism, and advertising, to support Latina and Latino film and media producers, journalists, and advertising professionals in training, and to foster scholarship and teaching on these topics. We do this through supporting a Latino and Latin American Media Arts & Studies minor, open to Moody College students and all UT-Austin undergraduates, through an annual speaker series that brings filmmakers, journalists, scholars, and creatives working in the U.S. film and television industries to campus, and through other programming for students and researchers.
Our New Associate Directors
Latino Media Arts & Studies is proud to announce that we have two new Associate Directors, one from within the Moody College and one from outside the Moody College.
Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a Professor in the School of Journalism and Director of VOCES Oral History Project, is the new Associate Director from within the college. She has more than 17 years of daily news experience, mostly as a reporter, for the Boston Globe, WFAA-TV in Dallas and the Dallas Morning News. Her research interests include the intersection of oral history and journalism and U.S. Latinos and the news media. Rivas-Rodriguez founded VOCES Oral History Project, the leading Latino oral history project in the United States, in 1999. Voces has organized conferences, produced books and mini-documentaries, co-produced a play, created educational materials, and become a resource for filmmakers, scholars, journalists and the general public.
Dr. Karma Chávez, Chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and an LMÁS affiliate, is joining the program as our Associate Director from outside the Moody College. Her research expertise is in queer of color theory, women of color feminisms, Latina/os and immigration activism and rhetoric, and field-based research methods. She is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States, and she also has co-edited two volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Her current project, AIDS Knows No Borders, explores AIDS activism and organizing on the issue of immigration and within immigrant communities during the height of the AIDS pandemic in North America, 1981-1995.
Dr. Rivas-Rodriguez and Dr. Chávez will be tremendous additions as they help to lead Latino Media Arts & Studies. I'm excited about collaborating with them in the coming years.
- Dr. Mary Beltrán, Director, Latino Media Arts & Studies
Latino Media Arts & Studies is a program of the Moody College of Communication. It is coordinated by faculty and graduate students in the Moody College's Department of Radio-Television-Film.
