BRIEF BIO:
JANET WALKER is Professor of Film Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Women's Studies and Comparative Literature Programs. She is the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and of a 2001 Distinguished Teaching Award from UCSB. Author or editor of several books and numerous published essays, her areas of specialization include documentary film; feminism and film theory; trauma and memory; and the social ecology of media.

Walker's most recent book, TRAUMA CINEMA (University of California Press, 2005), considers the audiovisual representation of catastrophic past events, and she is Project Director of VIDEO PORTRAITS OF SURVIVAL, a series of expressive documentary shorts about residents of Santa Barbara who are survivors and refugees of the Holocaust.

For a new book project on "Documentaries of Return," Walker is traveling and studying Israel-Palestine and New Orleans pre- and post-Katrina as mediated landscapes home and return.