Kristin L Dowell

For over twenty-five years Dr. Dowell has engaged in collaborative, community-based research with Indigenous filmmakers on Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada). Her research investigates the active processes through which Indigenous filmmakers express and enact visual sovereignty through their on-screen aesthetics and off-screen production practices. She is the author of Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast (2013), the first monograph of Vancouver’s vibrant and distinctive Indigenous media world. She is completing her second book, Digital Sutures: Family and Cultural Memory in Indigenous Women’s Films, under contract wtih Wayne State University Press. Digital Sutures analyzes how Indigenous women filmmakers re-define film genres, such as stop-motion animation, handmade cinema, and experimental documentary, to recuperate Indigenous family histories, ancestral knowledge, and cultural memory.

Public-facing engagement through curation, oral history projects, digital platforms, and museum practice is central to her work. Film programming is an integral aspect of her research practice, and she has worked for several Native film festivals including those sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Her video production handbook was published with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in 2021 and has been translated into Mandarin, Tibetan, and Irish. It is free and available for anyone to download. It has been used for community video workshops with Native American youth as well as with communities around the world engaged in media production for language revitalization efforts.

Professor Dowell is Irish American and a proud speaker of the Irish language. She curated the exhibition, Talamh agus Teanga: Land and Language in Contemporary Irish Art at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts in 2024. She continues to develop research and curatorial projects on Irish language cinema and contemporary Irish art. In 2026 she was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland hosted by University College Cork.

Professor Dowell also serves at the Arts Administration Program Director within the School of Theatre, Film & Television.