Jacqueline Stewart is the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Silent Sunday Nights showcases silent films from all over the world, including both features and shorts, spanning the work of groundbreaking filmmakers from Buster Keaton and Alice Guy Blaché to Oscar Micheaux, Gloria Swanson, and Robert Flaherty.
She is also a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. In 2018, Stewart was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2022, Stewart was named Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. In this position, she guided the vision of the Academy Museum and oversaw all aspects of its operations, through 2024. She was also host of The Academy Museum Podcast, which delves into the stories of cinema featured in the museum’s galleries. Previously, she was the Chief Artistic and Programming Officer for the Academy Museum.
Stewart was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021 for ensuring that the contributions of overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have a place in the public imagination.
Stewart is the author of the award-winning book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, a study of African Americans and silent cinema. She is coeditor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, a landmark study of the first generation of film school trained Black filmmakers out of UCLA, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Haile Gerima. She also co-edited William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission about the groundbreaking artist and Renaissance man. Stewart's writings have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, Film History, and The Moving Image.
Stewart is a passionate film archivist and advocate for film preservation. She studied moving image archiving at UCLA and the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) Summer School film restoration program at the Cineteca Bologna in Italy. She chairs the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB), which advises the Librarian of Congress on film preservation policy. Stewart has served on the Boards of Chicago Film Archives and the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
A native of Chicago's South Side, Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project in 2005 to preserve, digitize and screen amateur footage documenting everyday life from the perspectives of South Side residents.
Stewart’s interests as a scholar, archivist and curator come together in Pioneers of African American Cinema (Kino-Lorber), a 5-disc set she co-curated in 2015 that features the most comprehensive assemblage of early African American filmmaking.
Stewart is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Association of Moving Image Archivists 2023 Silver Light Award; the Portland Art Museum’s PAM CUT 2023 Cinema Unbound “Groundbreaker” Award, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Stewart received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago, and her BA from Stanford University where she majored in English. She was Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film and African American Studies at Northwestern University (2007-2013). Her research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
