People

Susan Kerns, PhD  
Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development
Email: skerns@colum.edu
Phone: (312) 369-6795
She/Hers

Susan Kerns, PhD, is a filmmaker, writer, and educator committed to creating consent-based classroom and professional spaces. As an Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts, Susan teaches cinema studies courses on horror, feminism, disability, and occasionally comic books in addition to world cinema and media theory. She also teaches producing courses on fundraising, marketing, and distribution for independent filmmakers. She is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Feminist Film Festival with Michelle Yates, PhD, and Content Acquisitions specialist at Cow Lamp Films. She also used the pandemic to begin training as an intimacy coordinator for film and television. Her continued film production and academic endeavors keep her grounded in both industries.

Susan is currently editing the first academic volume devoted to filmmaker Susan Seidelman while at work on several film and media projects. These include producing the true crime limited series Uncoiled and the VR horror experience Scapegoat as well as directing a historical biopic (currently untitled) produced by CTVA Associate Professor Kevin Cooper. She is also assisting CTVA Associate Professor Ruth Leitman with her reproductive rights documentary No One Asked You. Formerly, Susan produced the documentary Manlife, wrote the screenplay for Little Red, and produced or directed numerous award-winning short films. She has spoken about film festivals and distribution on panels at SXSW, University Film and Video Association, Art House Convergence, and the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies.

In addition to her forthcoming article on Smithereens in the Seidelman collection, her published work includes articles on film festival history, curation, and student involvement in Journal of Film and Video, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, and Cuaderno. She also recently collaborated with numerous authors, including CTVA Professor Wenhwa Ts’ao, on EDIT Media’s guide “Introducing Intimacy Coordination in the Media Classroom.”

Building on her background studying representations of conjoined twins in popular culture, she has published on Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake comics in Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels; representations of conjoined twins in nonfiction television and film in Comunicazioni Sociali: Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies; and how fictional single-bodied characters use conjoined twins as metaphor in Nip/Tuck: Television that Gets Under Your Skin. She also contributed a chapter on the silent Lon Chaney film The Penalty to Amputation in Literature and Film: Phantom Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss.” And, as an unabashed Tank Girl fan, her chapter “‘I’d Like Everything That’s Bad For Me!’: Tank Girl’s Cracks in Patriarchal Pop Culture” appears in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies.

She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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