Anaiis Cisco, assistant professor of moving image production in film and media studies, received her master’s in cinema from San Francisco State University in the spring of 2019. Cisco focuses on the experiences of underrepresented racial, ethnic, queer and gendered identities. Her short film, Breathless (2017), inspired by the murder of Eric Garner, has won numerous awards and has screened at various film festivals. Cisco’s most recent short narrative, GYRL (2018), is a portrait of a preteen African American girl struggling with an abusive father. Currently in the early stages of distribution her thesis film, Drip Like Coffee, explores Black womanhood, desire and space, while rendering the Black female body as fluid.

Cisco teaches digital video production courses at Smith, where she develops films that explore the emotional and internal journeys of Black characters, confronting intimate moments of violence and trauma in diverse story worlds.

Selected Works

Breathless (2017), short film.

“Precarity, Black Life, and Filmmaking: A Conversation with Filmmaker Anaiis Cisco.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2018.