Dr. Camille Dantzler is an Assistant Professor of Decolonial Studies in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies with an expertise in African film and literature, gender studies, art and culture policy, digital humanities, and critical trauma studies. Dantzler is a 2022-2024 Equity in Action Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Kean University in the Department of History and Africana Program. Her research centers on Central-East African film and history as sites of contested space in the exercise of political autonomy. The use of filmic expression as a critical and creative pathway to understanding gendered realities in postconflict contexts has been a primary focus to examine media discourse as historiographical indicators of governance and civil society. More broadly, current and future work lies in women and gender studies, film studies, digital and new media studies, migration studies, and developmental policy in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Previously, Dantzler served as a 2022 Library of Congress Junior Fellow in Enhancing Access: Creative Digital Projects for to create their autoethno-genealogical project, “Buy the Route: Black Labor Ecologies of the Dantzler Plantation from the Civil War through World War II” on African Diaspora migration experiences through forced intrastate and Atlantic movement in the Americas. She also served as a Symposium Co-Convenor for Rutgers University’s Afrofeminist Ecologies: Relations, Disruptions and Futures in 2022 and as a Trauma-informed Digital Storytelling Instructor for the Children's Defense Fund where she designed and facilitated classes centered on the use of digital storytelling and trauma-informed, evidence-based practices for the Youth Voices Storytelling Fellowship.
