Directory Profile

Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is also Co-Director of AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS), a practice-based studio and research initiative with funding from major institutional partners, including Dolby, Amazon, and Google. Her work explores how emerging technologies are transforming cinematic language, creative practice, and the cultures and industries of storytelling. Bringing together artistic experimentation and critical inquiry, she is working to help shape new approaches to AI that foreground human imagination and agency while engaging urgent questions of authorship, labor, bias, environmental impact, and creative responsibility.

Willis is the author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts and New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, as well as Björk Digital. She edited The New Ecology of Things, a collection of essays on ubiquitous computing, and David O. Russell: Interviews. Her teaching and research encompass AI and creativity, digital media, post-cinema, feminist film, experimental nonfiction, and emerging forms of storytelling.

A co-founder of Filmmaker Magazine, Willis previously served as editor of RES Magazine and co-curator of RESFEST, an international festival of experimental media. She is currently the co-curator of Flux Festival, showcasing the best experiments in innovative moving image storytelling and she writes regularly about experimental film, video, AI, new media, and the changing conditions of creative production. Her work has appeared in Film Comment, Afterimage, Los Angeles Review of Books, Variety, River Teeth, and carte blanche.