æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, PhD, MFA

writer artist educator scholar

æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil is a scholar, writer, and filmmaker whose work examines the aesthetic and political antagonisms of race, gender, and personhood across moving image media. Working at the intersections of Black queer and trans studies, Black feminist theory, film theory, and performance studies, her research and artistic practice explore how visual culture stages the conditions through which embodiment, desire, kinship, and belonging come into view.

She is Assistant Professor of Trans Cinema and Media at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed in the Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Prior to joining the faculty at U of T, hollis o’neil concurrently completed a PhD in Black Studies and an MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University, where she also obtained graduate certificates in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory. She holds an MA in American Studies and a graduate certificate in Documentary Filmmaking from George Washington University.

Her written scholarship appears in Feminist Theory, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Across her work, hollis o’neil engages questions of racialized gender, sexuality, violence, embodiment and relationality, with particular attention to how visual and performative practices both intervene and consolidate dominant regimes of knowledge, history, and representation.

Alongside her academic research, hollis o’neil maintains an experimental film and artistic practice that moves between documentary, essay film, and performance-based moving image work. Drawing on archival materials, personal narrative, and hybrid cinematic forms, her films explore the entanglements of memory, historiography, and Black trans aesthetic practice. Her work has screened at festivals and institutions including Harvard University, Prismatic Ground, Frameline Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, the San Francisco Documentary Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Prism: Austin’s Annual LGBTQ+ Film Festival, and the Academy Award–qualifying New Orleans Film Festival, where her film in the interval received the Jury Award for Best Experimental Short.

Her current book project, Staging the Cut: On Black Trans Flesh, Adaptive Ruin, and the Call of the Void, traces how acts of cutting—editing, framing, classification—shape the conditions under which Black and trans life can appear within visual culture. Moving across cinema, performance, archives, and contemporary art and experimental practice, the project examines how filmmakers and other artists return to these sites of incision to expose the histories of violence, adaptation, and possibility embedded within them.