Taryn Ely

Taryn Ely’s teaching and research focus on experimental cinema, popular film, and spectatorship as reflections of experiences and debates in social and political history, specifically the inequalities surrounding disability, gender, colonialism, and class.
She is currently expanding her doctoral research on films produced during and after the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the US, investigating how they represent and relate the roles of neurodivergence and psychotherapy. This research analyzes how moving-image art, popular cinema, educational, and documentary films incorporate historical concepts from psychology, psychiatry, and disability rights movements and encourage spectators to shift between the perspectives of patient and therapist, coinciding with the emergence of community mental health initiatives in the late twentieth century.

Through independent work and as a 2022-2023 Luce/ACLS Fellow in American Art, Dr. Ely has conducted archival research at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, the Film-makers’ Cooperative, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Harvard Film Archive.

She utilizes her experiences in archival research, film programming, and moving-image installation in her teaching of cinema, disability, and cultural studies.