Bio

Jennifer Lynn Peterson (PhD, University of Chicago) is a cinema and media historian, educator, and writer living in Los Angeles.

I’m the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). My scholarly articles have been published in Representations, Feminist Media Histories, JCMS, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, and Getty Research Journal. I have published chapters in several edited anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Ends of Cinema, Hollywood on Location: An Industry History, Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, and Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. My film, art, and book reviews have been published in Critical Inquiry, JCMS, Millenium Film Journal, Texte zur Kunst, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum.com, and Contemporary Art Review LA (Carla). Previously I was a tenured Associate Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. After returning to my home state of California, I’m now a Professor in the Filmmaking Program at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where I teach courses on film and media history and analysis. As of fall 2025 I’m also Associate Dean of Architecture, Design, and Media.

I’m currently completing the manuscript of my second book, Conservation Motion Pictures: Cinema and the Production of Nature, under contract with Columbia University Press.

Much has been written about the early nature conservation movement in the U.S., but surprisingly little has been written about its use of motion pictures, even though film has played a crucial role in conservation from the start. As my book shows, not only did cinema emerge on a parallel timeline with the conservation movement, but cinema and conservation have an intertwined history. Grounded in archival research on Hollywood feature films and nonfiction films made by the National Park Service, the US Department of Agriculture, and the Save-the-Redwoods League, my book examines film history in the context of conservation history. I analyze Hollywood features shot on location in “wilderness” settings — including Valley of the Giants (1919, 1927, and 1938 versions) and Mantrap (Victor Fleming, 1926) — alongside nonfiction films such as Highroads and Skyroads (USDA, 1922), Seeing Yosemite National Park (NPS, 1930), and The Land of Lofty Mountains (NPS, 1936). Analysis of cinematic realism has a well-established lineage in film theory, in both fiction and nonfiction film. But often, the environment has been understood as a film’s background, a setting for the human drama in the foreground. Conservation Motion Pictures reverses this hierarchy and considers cinema’s potentialities and limitations as an ecological medium. In tracing cinematic renderings of natures past, we learn not only how nature was envisioned, contested, cared for, and exploited in an earlier era; we also gain insight into our alienated relationship with nature in the present, which must be addressed if we are to transition into a more just and sustainable future.

Biographical: I was born and grew up in Santa Barbara, CA. I’m the first in my family to attend college. I live in Northeast Los Angeles (unceded Gabrieliño/Tongva land) with my spouse, two kids, a big dog, and a school of small fish.