Cinta Pelejà
Postdoc
The Moving Image and the Making of a Care-Centered World: Aging, Materiality, and Labor
Cinta Pelejà’s research project examines how aging-care politics have been imagined, lived, and negotiated in and around moving image works. This project considers aging-centered work of artists, filmmakers, theorists, and curators to explore the political imbrications between aging and film aesthetics, artistic production and legacy planning, as well as discourses of care and intergenerational world-building. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, aging studies, and the histories of cinephilia, this study reconsiders the relation between aging and the moving image by shifting the focus from representational to material, formal, and labor concerns.
Profile
Cinta Pelejà (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her research focuses on transnational non-fiction cinemas and bears on theoretical and historical questions around politics, gender, and the archive. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2023. Based on her doctoral dissertation, her monograph-in-progress, The Screen Encounter, examines the phenomenon of seeing oneself onscreen—a reception practice referred to as “screen encounter” and embedded into viewing habits that run from early cinema to contemporary media. It analyzes how the screen encounter has been employed as an aesthetic device within a range of models of moving image making to develop inquiries around history, aging, and the collective. Cinta’s work has appeared in Feminist Media Histories and the New Review of Film and Television Studies blog. Alongside her academic career, she also works as a film programmer. She has been a curator and producer of Apordoc—Portuguese Documentary Association, and served as co-director of Doclisboa—International Film Festival.
