Our Story

University of Chicago professor of Cinema and Media Studies Jacqueline Stewart (AM ’93, PhD ’99) is the founder and director of the South Side Home Movie Project. Dr. Stewart’s research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories, including nontheatrical, amateur and activist film and video. Stewart is Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and is also the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies. She is author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005), the co-edited book William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission (2021), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is the co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and locally, curated both Black Cinema House and Cinema 53, a film series at the historic Harper Theater in Hyde Park.

Saroop Singh (they/them) is a memory-worker, documenter, and an audiovisual archivist. His practice emerges from a mix of in/formal training and apprenticeships in black memory-keeping traditions, art and cultural studies, participatory design, media technology, and archival practices. He enjoys working at the margins of memory and media to recover and share the personal and communal narratives that allow us to find honor, connection, and meaning in the cultural heritage objects we are lucky enough to preserve. As the South Side Home Movie Project’s Archivist and Project Manager, Justin is honored to work closely with families to preserve and share their home movies as well as the artists, students, researchers and community members who seek to creative engage and reuse these incredible documents of personal documentation. Justin has worked with Kartemquin Films, the Logan Center's Digital Storytelling Initiative, Community Film Workshop of Chicago, Storycorps, City Bureau, and partnered with dozens of organizations to design and produce digital storytelling projects.

Camille “Ami” Townson (they/them) is a digital audiovisual archivist and community organizer. They were a 2022 AMIA Pathways Fellow with SSHMP and are grateful to be assisting with such a unique body of work. They earned their B.S. in Cognitive Science: Human-Computer Interaction and Design from University of California at San Diego ('20) and specialize in user experience, digital accessibility, and critical gender studies. They are most interested in intimate history-making and increasing community access to archival material.

Avery LaFlamme (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on Black film history and Black documentary and nonfiction filmmaking. His work at SSHMP supports archival initiatives and public programming, in particular the Spinning Home Movies series.

Hugo Ljungbäck (he/him) is a Swedish video artist, film curator, and media scholar. His research focuses on the intersection of video art, media archaeology, and the archive, and examines the materiality of the moving image and its processes of mediation. His videos regularly explore queer subjectivities and tell underrepresented stories about intimacy, coercion, surveillance, and historical memory. He is a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and holds an MFA in Studio Art from UNC Chapel Hill (’22) and a BFA in Film from UW-Milwaukee (’20).