Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Heartfelt congratulations to the distinguished individuals comprising our latest cohort of Film & Media Ph.D. students embarking on their academic journey this upcoming fall! We are thrilled to embrace your unique perspectives, talents, and aspirations, confident that your contributions will enrich and invigorate our dynamic and lively community at Cal. Here’s to a fulfilling and inspiring tenure ahead, filled with boundless opportunities for growth, exploration, and academic excellence!

Isadora (Isa) Bratton-Benfield
Isa received her BA in Art from UCLA and MSc in Media, Communication, and Development from the LSE. Her work is situated within the transformation and intersection of labor regimes, aesthetic typologies, and developmentalist discourses that constitute the increasing proliferation of digital media infrastructures. Isa is interested in the territorial struggles and social contestations that drive place-based transformations related to media infrastructure, including their concomitant ecological and social outcomes.

Lucas Fink 
Lucas Fink received their BA in Film and Media Studies at UC Berkeley in May of 2023. During their undergraduate time, Lucas became interested in the problems posed by the digital turn to classical metaphysics, classical cinematic / aesthetic perspectival regimes, and discourses around film genre. For graduate school, they hope to extend this line of inquiry by way of the black radical tradition and affect theory.

e. morris
e. morris received their BA in English and American Literatures from Middlebury College, followed by an MA in Latin American Studies at UCLA. She works with trans* aesthetic practices emergent across analog, embodied, and digital media, reorienting questions of being and agency vis-à-vis the strictures of gendered violence as a transcultural phenomenon.

Victor Omojola
Victor earned a B.A. from Columbia University with a major in Film and Media Studies and a minor in Political Science. He has conducted research on the relationship between the political messaging of post-1960 Cuban films and their use of Afro-Cuban music, religion, and language. In graduate school, Victor is excited to further explore militant Latin American film movements’ representation of the Black diaspora, aesthetics of early West African cinema, and video-making as a form of inquiry.