This website is a deeply honest response to a systemic problem in both academia and the arts.

I know I am not alone as both an academic and a media maker in feeling pulled in different directions by institutional expectations that seem to demand singular identities and separate lanes. I’ve chosen to navigate that pressure here with creativity and intentionality through storytelling and web design in an attempt to integrate my work rather than compartmentalize, to shift from separation to synthesis.

Rather than positioning my creative and critical work as opposites, I approach my media practice as a way of doing theory in popular form. Through widely accessible formats—from genre fiction to short film to journalism—I contribute to the cultural discourses that communication studies seeks to understand and critique. This work is praxis in the fullest sense: situated, reflexive, and committed to engaging public imaginaries.

Yet, the false dichotomy between scholarly and artistic practice, between theory and praxis, persists.

My work resists this either/or.

I don’t write YA novels instead of theory—I write them through it. I don’t direct films outside my research—I direct films as research. My work lives in the overlap: in the tension, in the translation, in the navigation between worlds that don’t always speak to each other but need to.

-Jennesia