Hayley O’Malley is an assistant professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford. Before coming to Iowa, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow with the Black Arts Archive Sawyer Seminar at Northwestern University. 

Dr. O’Malley’s interdisciplinary research and teaching focus broadly on African American literature, film, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on Black feminist art and activism since the 1960s. Her current book project, Dreams of a Black Cinema, is an archivally-driven history of the myriad ways that African American women writers experimented with film and worked to build a new Black women’s film culture from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Her research has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Huntington Library, Princeton University’s Firestone Library, the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, and other institutions. And her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Black Camera, James Baldwin Review, ASAP/J, Feminist Media Histories, Shakespeare On Stage and Off, and The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature, among other venues.  

Dr. O’Malley also regularly organizes public programming related to a variety of topics in Black cultural studies. With Allyson Nadia Field (University of Chicago), Yvonne Welbon (Sisters in Cinema), Monica Freeman (independent filmmaker and curator), and Michael W. Phillips (South Side Projections), she is currently co-organizing a screening series and symposium inspired by the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, considered the first Black women’s film festival. And with Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, she is co-coordinating a Humanities Lab at the University of Iowa on the topic of “Creating with Archives.”