SCMS is Honored to Celebrate Our Award Winners!

Thank you to everyone who submitted their work for the 2026 SCMS Awards cycle. A special thank you also goes to those who dedicated their time and effort to selecting the winners. Your thoughtfulness, countless hours, and commitment to fairness are deeply appreciated. The submissions showcased an exceptional level of scholarship and pedagogy, making for a truly competitive selection process. While not all nominations could be recognized, we sincerely encourage you to submit new work for awards consideration in the future.

Join us as we honor this year’s outstanding achievements during the Award Ceremony in Chicago on Friday evening, March 27, at 7:15 pm CDT. Don’t miss this special opportunity to celebrate the remarkable work of our community.

Plus, don’t miss a special event from 2–3 pm CDT, moderated by Lucy Fischer, as we honor our 2026 Distinguished Career Achievement Award Winner—Patrice Petro.

We can’t wait to celebrate with you—see you there!

Student Awards

Student Writing Award

First Place

Chu Wang
University of Toronto
“When Bugs Reject Scripts: Operational Images and Their Entanglements in Mao’s War Against Insects”

Second Place

Kallan Benjamin
University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Inadmissible: Working Girls (1931), Christopher Strong (1933), and the Politics of Pre-Code Reproduction”

Third Place

Runjie Wang
University of Washington
“Cinemetric/Cinematic Encoding: Industrial Cinema, Machine Vision and the Aesthetic-Epistemic Operation of Order on Assembly Line”

Dissertation Award

Andy Kelleher Stuhl
Seton Hall University
“Unmaking a Medium: Automation and Art in American Radio, 1950–2010” (McGill University, 2024)

Essay Awards

Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award

Jordan Schonig
University of California, Santa Barbara
“Laborious Aesthetics: Visible and Invisible Labor in the Spider-Verse Franchise,” Animation 20, no. 1 (2025): 25–40

Best Essay In An Edited Collection Award

Mattie Jacobs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Invisible Contributors: Narrative Film Production, Studio Epitexts, and Test Audiences” in The Materiality of Narrative Dynamics, 159–176, eds. Stefan Iversen and Evan Van Tassell (Walter de Gruyter, 2025)

Book or Project Awards

Best First Book Award

Tupur Chatterjee
Tulane University
Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025)

Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award

Jennifer Holt
University of California, Santa Barbara
Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024)

Best Edited Collection Award

Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Global Movie Magazine Networks (University of California Press, 2025)

Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award

Anna Munster
University of New South Wales
DeepAesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning (Duke University Press, 2025)

Teaching and Career Awards

Innovative Pedagogy Award

Cinema & Screen Studies, Swinburne University
Liam Burke, Andrew Lynch, César Albarrán-Torres, Naja Later, Dan Golding and Karen Horsley

Distinguished Career Achievement Award

Patrice Petro
University of California, Santa Barbara