Get to know Zachariah

Zachariah Anderson is a film and media scholar who researches the roles of archival images as evidence in the “post-truth era.” He is particularly interested in documentary cinema’s processes of appropriating and reactivating archival materials to construct historical knowledge about past violence and injustice.

His research about documentary cinema and its recontextualization of diverse archival sources is published in Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Iluminace, and Found Footage. His current research project investigates documentaries’ reuses of appropriated police-produced surveillance images to support constructions of race, crime, and histories of police violence.

Previously, Zachariah served as the Director of Programming for the Moving Image Society at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he received his PhD in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies and taught a variety of film studies courses. He also taught global film history and exploitation cinema at Columbia College Chicago.