Dr. Ida Yoshinaga

Specializes in science fiction film -- in particular, the hybridization of commercial science-fiction, fantasy, horror and fairy-tale genre modes with regional and Indigenous narrative traditions, in the story-development stage of pre-production for both the media industries and for alternative audiovisual venues such as indie and global cinema. An ethnic-screenwriting scholar and media producer of the movie-making work of Native Asian and Pacific Islander directors, she focuses on the connection between production relations and the cinematic form.

A recipient of the East-West Center pre-doctoral fellowship, the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship, Science Fiction Studies journal's R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship (Ph.D. Award), the Support a New Scholar Award of the Science Fiction Research Association and the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts' Walter James Miller Memorial Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic, Yoshinaga has published articles on cinematic story development, screenwriting and transmedia in, among other venues, Science Fiction Film and Television; The New Ray Bradbury Review; Narrative Culture; and The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures. Her edited anthology of provocative think pieces on how sf can save humankind from neoliberalism and empire, co-edited with Gerry Canavan and Sean Guynes, Uneven Futures: Lessons for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction, will be published in 2022 by MIT Press. She is working on a book on Disney, gender and creative labor for the new Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture series for the University of Minnesota Press.

A former Division Head of the International Fantastic Division of the IAFA and past co-organizer of the Science Fiction Research Association national conference, she was an inaugural judge for the SFRA Book Award, serves on the editorial board of the World Science Fiction Series (for Peter Lang Oxford), and, as an affiliate researcher of LMU Munich's global Indigeneities in the 21st Century project, supports Indigenous mediamakers in making short films and museum exhibits about the niu (coconut).