Jesús Costantino

Jesús Costantino researches and teaches film and visual media. His first book, Scraps in Black and White, connects the seemingly disparate histories of modernist abstraction, new media technologies, and US segregation by accounting for their shared preoccupation with interracial prizefighting. He has also begun work on a new project titled Under the Sign of Disaster Triumphant that analyzes the shared legacies throughout the Americas of dispossession and disappearance, abstract processes made visible in depictions of architectural ruin in film and the visual arts. Supplementing these two projects, he continues to explore the interplay between visual media and American culture in essays on subjects ranging from the fashion photography of Gordon Parks, independent video game design, superhero comics, digital media of forced disappearance, and contemporary Latin American cinema.