Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Tory Jeffay is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University. Her dissertation, “The Forensic Imaginary: Visual Media and Evidentiary Culture” looks to the history of photography and film as evidence within law and policing from the late nineteenth  to the mid-twentieth century to better understand contemporary uses of visual evidence.

Her essay “‘Flat-Out’ Formalism: Strong Island as Trans-of-Color Critique” won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Queer and Trans Caucus’s Chris Holmlund Graduate Student Essay Prize and is forthcoming in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. She serves as the co-organizer of the Graduate Film Working Group, and her work has been supported by grants from the California State Library, Berkeley Center for New Media, the Center for Japanese Studies, and the UC Berkeley Graduate Division. Prior to her studies at Berkeley she worked as an editor of documentary films.