I am a scholar and curator dedicated to preserving, honoring, and analyzing Black film and culture. I am the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (2021) and an associate professor in the Cinematic Arts department at the University of Miami. I have lectured internationally on Baker’s legacy and I co-curated Icon in Motion: Josephine Baker at the New National Gallery in Berlin in 2024. My video essay, Josephine Baker Watches Herself was published with an introduction in Feminist Media Histories (2023). I have published articles on topics such as Afrosurrealism and Jamaican film, along with several artist interviews, and I have delivered keynotes and masterclasses on doing women's film history, mining Caribbean film memory, and exploring Baker's film legacy.
Since moving to Miami in 2021, I have extended my scholarship to the wider public through community conversations and collaborations with artists and archivists in the city. I am immersed in Miami's arts community through moderating conversations on film, literature, and public memory with the Miami-Dade Public Library, Coral Gables Art Cinema, Books and Books, the Miami Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Third Horizon Film Festival, and the Perez Art Museum Miami. For the last three years I have curated The African American Film Festival at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, FL.
I am a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, and my writing can be found in Another Gaze, SEEN, and Lithub, Film History, Black Camera, and Film Quarterly. I recently co-edited a collection of essays for Feminist Media Histories called “Camille Billops and James V. Hatch: A Certain Defiance.”
About Josephine Baker
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker is perhaps better known in Europe where she built a 50-year career as an entertainer and celebrity, but she holds monumental significance for Black film history in the United States. After landing in Paris in 1925, Baker established her colonialist comedy-erotic repertoire as a dancer in the music hall and then transitioned to film in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Baker starred in four French productions: Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zou Zou (1934), Princess Tam Tam (1935), and The French Way (1945). In Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism, Dr. Francis presents a critical reflection upon Baker’s multitudes and her cinematic legacy in (re)defining African American cinema through her global work as a dancer, singer, and film star.
About Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism
Josephine Baker, among the first Black women to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and delightfully undignified, playfully vacillating between forward-thinking allure and colonialist stereotyping.
Nicknamed the "Black Venus," "Black Pearl," and "Creole Goddess," Baker blended the sensual and the comedic when taking 1920s Europe by storm. Back home in the United States, Baker's film career brought hope to the Black press that a new cinema centered on Black glamour would come to fruition. In Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue.
Francis contends that though Baker was an African American actress who lived and worked in France exclusively with a white film company, white costars, white writers, and white directors, she holds monumental significance for African American cinema as the first truly global Black woman film star. Francis also examines the double-talk between Baker and her characters in Le Pompier de Folies Bergère, La Sirène des Tropiques, Zou Zou, Princesse Tam Tam, and The French Way, whose narratives seem to undermine the very stardom they offered. In doing so, Francis artfully illuminates the most resonant links between emergent African American cinephilia, the diverse opinions of Baker in the popular press, and African Americans' broader aspirations for progress toward racial equality.
Examining an under-explored aspect of Baker's career, Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism deepens the ongoing conversation about race, gender, and performance in the African diaspora.