Japanese Cinema and Videographic Criticism
Dr. Colleen Laird, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Cinema in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research focuses on Japanese visual media, with particular attention to gendered image production, reception, and the roles of women in the film industry. She is currently completing a monograph, under contract with Rutgers University Press, which examines the emergence and impact of women filmmakers in contemporary Japanese cinema.
Dr. Laird is Co-PI on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Ways of Undoing project (2026-2028) as well as co-organizer of the Videographic Venice summer programs at Venice International University. Her piece “See Under: Orient” won Honorable Mention at the 2025 Adelio Ferrero Award festival. She is the lead researcher of the SSHRC-funded Japanese Women Directors Project (forthcoming) and is a founding member of the Ways of Doing videographic collective. She co-organized the SSHRC-funded “Embodying the Video Essay” workshop at Bowdoin College (USA, 2023), and the SSHRC-funded “Reframing the Argument: Videographic Criticism as Graduate Research Practice” workshop held at Notre Dame University (USA, summer, 2025). Dr. Laird is an advisory board member of the Leverhulme Grant project "This Woman's Screen Work?: Creativity, Care and Gender in Asian Film” led by Wikanda Promkhuntong (Mahidol University, Thailand), Kate Taylor Jones (University of Sheffield), and Louise Wei (City University of Hong Kong). She is also an affiliate faculty teaching with the program in Videographic Criticism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
She has produced several public-facing educational video series on Japanese cinema, including topics such as J-Horror and formal film analysis, all available as Open Education Resources. Her work in videographic criticism and video production is central to both her research and pedagogy; her video essays have been recognized in the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound poll of “Best Video Essays” since 2022. At UBC, she teaches courses on Japanese film, gender and media, and videographic criticism, emphasizing multimodal learning and creative scholarship.
She has published videographic works in 16:9, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Open Screens, Screenworks, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, and Tekonokultura. She also has print articles with the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, Frames Cinema Journal, and Jump Cut.