CEMI

Cindy McCreery was a Walt Disney/ABC Feature Writing Fellow and has since sold feature projects to New Line Cinema, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, National Geographic Films, Warner Brothers, MGM, Branded Entertainment and Lionsgate. She also writes for television and has sold projects to SyFy Channel, Disney Channel, NBC, TNT, Televisa USA, Universal Television and AMC’s Shudder. Cindy has been teaching screenwriting and television writing since 2004 at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in The Department of Radio-TV-Film.

Dr. Willard was a lecturer in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She was also the RTF Internship Director. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, platform studies, and media industry studies; in all of these arenas, she focuses on labor and professionalization. She completed her Ph.D. in media studies here at UT Austin, where she served as a teaching assistant and assistant instructor for RTF courses. In 2017, she was recognized as UT Austin’s top teaching assistant, receiving the William S. Livingstone Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant award. She has also taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and Salt Lake Community College (SLCC). She is an external affiliate with and the Assistant Director of Moody College’s Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI). She is also a co-founder of the annual Fan Studies Network-North America (FSN-NA) conference. Previously, she has coordinated the Flow Conference and UT’s Women & Gender Studies Emerging Scholarship Conference. She has served in an editorial capacity with Big Data & Society, The Velvet Light Trap, and Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. She has also served as the Director of UT’s Queer Graduate Student Alliance (QGSA) and the Graduate Student Representative for the Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly Interest Group for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).

Kristina Brüning is a PhD Student in the Radio-Television-Film Department at UT Austin. She holds an MA in American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in German Studies from the University of Michigan. In her doctoral work, Kristina combines media industry studies and feminist media studies. Her dissertation explores the working conditions, affective experiences, and creative agency of actors in the post-#MeToo streaming era. She has published articles in Feminist Media Studies, Television & New Media, and Media Industries Journal.

Peter Arne Johnson is a Ph.D. student in media studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on critical media industry studies, critical political economy, U.S. film and television history, and media finance. Pete’s work considers how financial structures and discursive constructions in financial markets can shape the range and nature of media texts. He has been published in Democratic Communiqué, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Media Industries Journal.

Dr. Chen is an associate professor of media sociology, the founding co-director of Center for Entertainment and Media Industries, and a Distinguished Scholar in the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chen has more than 90 publications, including articles in top-ranked journals in the fields of communication and media studies, sociology, and management. Dr. Chen’s research has received awards from the Academy of Management, International Association of Chinese Management Research, American Sociological Association and International Communication Association. She  served as the chair of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of American Sociological Association in 2017-2018. Dr. Chen’s work has been reported by the media in the U.S., China, and Canada. Dr. Chen’s current project examines how U.S. and Chinese AI policies affect tech and media entrepreneurship.