Anaiis Cisco

Anaiis Cisco, assistant professor of moving image production in film and media studies, received her master’s in cinema from San Francisco State University in the spring of 2019. Cisco’s film work is situated at the intersections of Black queer feminist filmmaking traditions, Black film studies and cinema production, Black girlhood studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She develops media that explores the emotional and internal journeys of Black and queer characters as they navigate nuanced story worlds. Her debut feature film, Drip Like Coffee, is a drama centering on Black queer women’s desire. The film had its world premiere at the American Black Film Festival in June 2024 and its international premiere at the British Film Institute’s Flare Film Festival in March 2025. Cisco’s body of work includes short narratives such as Breathing Free (2020), an opera film about mass incarceration and police brutality; Drip Like Coffee (2019), a thesis project exploring Black womanhood, desire and space; Breathless (2017), inspired by the murder of Eric Garner; and GYRL (2018), a portrait of a preteen African American girl struggling with an abusive father. These projects have screened at dozens of festivals and have received several awards, including a 2018 Princess Grace Award, a 2021 Mass Cultural Council finalist award, and a 2021 Drama League nominee.

Cisco has received several fellowships to support her research, including the 2024–26 Visiting Assistant Professor Mellon Teaching Fellowship in the Film and Media Studies Department at Dartmouth College. Additionally, she was awarded the 2021–22 Mellon Faculty of Color Working Group Fellowship from the New England Humanities Consortium, which was hosted at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

Breathless (2017), short film.

“Precarity, Black Life, and Filmmaking: A Conversation with Filmmaker Anaiis Cisco.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2018.