Contact Information
gateward@arizona.edu
520.621.7352
Dr. Frances Gateward has been appointed as the next director of the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television. She will begin her appointment the summer of 2025.
Gateward currently serves as professor and chair of the Department of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies at Howard University. Previously, she was professor of cinema and television arts at California State University, Northridge (CTVA), where she also served as associate chair and director of the Media Theory and Criticism option. With more than 1,700 majors, CTVA has been listed among the top 25 film schools in the U.S. by Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.
Gateward brings national leadership experience to the role. Since 2022, she has served on the board of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the leading scholarly organization in the U.S. dedicated to advancing the study of film, television and media. Gateward also serves as an advisor to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
She earned her BA in Radio/TV/Film from Temple University, and she holds an MA in Communication Arts and Theater and a PhD in Film Studies, both earned at the University of Maryland College Park. Her research focuses on the relation between aesthetics and ideology in film, television, and popular culture.
She is the author and editor of several acclaimed books, including Seoul Searching: Cultural Identity and Korean Cinema—one of the first English-language books on Korean film—Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, and The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, which received multiple awards.