Cassandra Guan

Cassandra Guan serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, specializing in animation history through the lens of modernist aesthetics, media technologies, and life sciences. Her research investigates the material entanglements between political cinema and transnational bioanalytic paradigms across global contexts.

Her core research domains include:

• Histories of animation and materialist methodology
• Media infrastructures and biotechnology intersections
• State-sponsored film production and geopolitical media
• Sinophone cinema theory and political modernism
• Marxist-psychoanalytic frameworks in media studies

Recent publications (2020-2024) reveal consistent engagement with animation's philosophical dimensions, examining indexicality, temporal plasticity, and geopolitical representation through Chinese revolutionary cinema, ethnographic film, and technical reproducibility debates—often synthesizing Marxist theory with psychoanalytic approaches.

Her scholarly recognition includes:

• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT CAST
• New York State Council on the Arts Film Finishing Award

Guan's creative practice as a filmmaker complements her academic work, notably through the documentary "Tender Comrades" exploring gender in Chinese left-wing cinema. Her teaching portfolio spans foundational courses like "Film and the Moving Image" alongside specialized seminars on Beijing's cinematic representation and materialist methodologies.