Ashley R. Smith received her MA in cinema studies from New York University where she was awarded a Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Fellowship and was the recipient of the William K. Everson Award for Academic Excellence. She also holds a BA in English from Rider University.
Ashley teaches courses on diversity and inclusion in film and television, film aesthetics, film history, media and cultural theory, horror cinema and media authorship.
Her dissertation examines the emergence of whiteness as a destabilized, fractured, and “Othered” identity in post-1960s American horror cinema, and the social, political and cultural changes that occurred alongside this representational shift.
She has written and presented on topics including race and class representation in horror cinema, body horror and decay in film and photography, and the authorial influence of directors such as Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher. Ashley also serves as the current graduate student representative for the Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.