Joshua Yumibe

Biography

Joshua Yumibe’s research focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema, specifically related to color. He also has expertise in avant-garde and experimental cinemas, nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, Frankfurt school theory, and archival theories and practices. He is an editor of Screen and of the Contemporary Film Directors Series at the University of Illinois Press.

Yumibe is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which received honorable mention for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies first book award. He is co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen, and foreword  by Martin Scorsese. The book was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. With  Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Yumibe is also co-author of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (Columbia University Press, 2019), which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and won both the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award (2020) and the IAMHIST-Michael Nelson Prize, International Association for Media and History (2021).He also co-edited five books, including most recently Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (2024) with Sarah Street.

Yumibe is currently working on a book, provisionally titled Chromatic Blackness: Color, Race, and the Moving Image. It examines the relation of color as a material and technical hue with the use of color for delineating race, as in people of color. The core of the research focuses on color in the moving image within African and African diasporic cinemas, from the late 1960s through contemporary media while also framing this material comparatively in relation to broader currents in film and cultural history.

Since 2003, Yumibe has  been collaborating with Paolo Cherchi Usai on the archival collection, Davide Turconi Project. In 2011, they launched the project online to provide access to the collection as part of the 30th anniversary of the Giornate del Cinema. In 2018, Yumibe curated the related exhibit “Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema” at the George Eastman Museum.

In 2016, he was a recipient of the Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award, which is granted to faculty who early in their careers have earned the respect of students and colleagues for their devotion to and skill in teaching, and whose instruction is linked to and informed by their research and creative activities. From 2013 to 2021, he served as the Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He also served on the executive committee of Domitor, the International Society of the Study of Early Cinema (2011–2018) and was the vice-president of the organization from 2016–2018. Receiving his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago  in 2007, he was previously an assistant professor at Oakland University and a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Turin, Department of Humanities, CAM: Cinema, Arti della scena, Musica e Media (2023).

Yumibe is Japanese American; his late grandparents met and became engaged at the Tule Lake internment camp during World War II.