Juan Carlos Kase
Department Chair
Juan Carlos Kase is Associate Professor and Chair of Film Studies at UNCW. He is a film historian whose ongoing research concerns the overlapping aesthetic, historical, and political registers of experimental cinema, documentary, art history, independent filmmaking, and popular music. He has published widely on avant-garde film, in journals including October, Millennium Film Journal, Discourse, and The Moving Image. In 2022–23 he curated the film program, "Trajectories of Self-Determination: Experimental Cinema's Embrace of Jazz," while serving as a curatorial fellow in the Canyon Cinema Discovered program. In the fall of 2026, University of California Press will be publishing his monograph, Post-Manson Cinema: Horror, Transgression, and Susan Sontag's America in the 1970s.
Education
BA, Concentration in Spanish Language and Literature, Columbia University
MA, Film Studies, New York University
PhD, Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California
Research Interests
American Film History, Experimental Cinema, Documentary, Third Cinema and Counter-Cinema, Horror, Film Theory