Jasmyn R. Castro

Jasmyn R. Castro is a native of Buffalo, N.Y. In Winter 2014, she created the African American Home Movie Archive, a growing, online aggregate of African American home movie collections throughout the U.S. From 2015-2018, she served as Media Conservation and Preservation Associate for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and for the past year has served as digital historian and archivist for Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project where she has worked to conceive, implement and manage the digital archive. Her chapter, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent,” was published as part of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, a volume that reevaluates assumptions about American film culture and race’s place within it.

Research Interests

Access, archival film studies, Black film and television history, production studies, Black women in film and television, self-documentation within the Black community, and re-contextualizing traditional historical narratives of African American history and culture

Education

M.A., Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, NYU Tisch School of the Arts
B.A., Film and Women’s Studies, SUNY Empire State College
A.A., Film and Television Production, RCC: Toronto Film School

Selected Publications

Castro, Jasmyn R., “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent.” In Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, edited by Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, 372-392. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.