Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Hannah Beachler with Jacqueline Stewart

Hannah Beachler is a prolific production designer with an affinity for evocative designs and visuals. She crafts unique emotional landscapes for every story.
She recently began prepping for her next project with director and frequent collaborator Melina Matsoukas, the pilot for FX’s Y: The Last Man, based on the comic book series.
Beachler designed Marvel’s Black Panther for director Ryan Coogler, which just became the 9th-highest grossing film of all time. Her incredible work on the film earned her a 2018 Saturn Award for Best Production Design. She previously collaborated with Coogler on: Creed, the spinoff from the Rocky film series starring Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone; and Fruitvale Station, the 2013 Sundance Film Festival breakout film and winner of the Prix de L’Avenir in the Un Certain Regard competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
She also collaborated with director Barry Jenkins on the 2017 Best Picture Oscar-winning film, Moonlight, a coming-of-age tale that transcends traditional genre boundaries. The film was named one of the top 25 movies of the 21st century by the New York Times.
In 2016, Beachler designed Beyoncé’s stunning visual concept album Lemonade and took home the 2017 Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design for Awards or Event Special and earned a 2016 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design For A Variety Nonfiction Event Or Award Special.
Current collaborators include: Academy Award-nominated director Dee Rees, Grammy and Emmy-nominated director Khalil Joseph, Grammy Award-winning director Melina Matsoukas, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison, prolific cinematographers Maryse Alberti and Malik Sayeed, and legendary Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood. Based in New Orleans, she is represented in the United States by DDA.
Jacqueline Stewart is Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories, including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video. She directs the Southside Home Movie Project and the Cinema 53 screening and discussion series. Jacqueline is also Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at University Chicago and co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. She also serves as an appointee to the National Film Preservation Board.
Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, which has achieved recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded fellowships from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Franke Institute for the Humanities at University of Chicago, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Program.
Stewart earned her AM and PhD in English from the University of Chicago and an AB in English with interdisciplinary emphasis from Stanford University.