Sheila Petty
As a media theorist, Sheila Petty's work encompasses new media, cinema, television narrative and aesthetics, African and African diasporic cinema, television & web texts and post-colonialism. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity and nation in African and African diasporic screen media, and has curated film, television and digital media exhibitions for galleries across Canada. Her current research focuses on interpretive strategies for analyzing digital creative cultural practices and living cultural heritage. She is one of the first scholars in Canada to research and write in the area of African cinema/Women in African Cinema. Petty’s new ways of thinking about African cinema, film feminism, and digital media narratives demonstrate an ethical engagement with and respectful approach to researching about other cultures by allowing the theory to arise from the culture itself. Her work has been quoted as “exemplifying a rigorous immersion of non-Western intellectual practices, to build new framework for studying a ‘Western’ art form”. She has several publications promoting this approach, particularly, “African Frameworks of Analysis for African Film Studies” (2012) which led to new work in North Africa on Amazigh cinema (including a forthcoming book on Habiba Djahnine and essays on cultural sovereignty in Moroccan Amazigh cinema – pioneering works in English and in the field. Over the course of her career, she has published and presented over 180 papers and attracted over 3 million dollars in external research funding.
She was the first social scientist to be named adjunct scientist in new media at Telecommunications Research Labs Regina, a not-for-profit applied research consortium based in western Canada. In 2001 she founded the New Media Studio Laboratory, a Canada Foundation for Innovation-funded lab for research on interdisciplinary digital research spanning Fine Arts, Computer Science and Engineering – at the time, an innovative move toward interdisciplinarity. She held the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities, at Northwestern University in 1992 and in 2001 was the Lansdowne Scholar, Department of French, University of Victoria. She has acted as a visiting professor in the Faculty of Design and Art, Xiamen University of Technology (China), where she held guest professorship until December 2016.
She served two terms as Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts (now known as the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance) and was Directrice par interim of the Institut français at the University of Regina from 2012-2014.