Jayson Lantz

Jayson Lantz is a doctoral candidate on the Comparative Media track in CSLC, as well as a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate recipient. He also holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute for the Arts and a BA in Film Studies and French from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Jayson’s research concerns documentary form as it takes shape across and between varying media, and he is currently focused on the interrelations of photography, film, and illustrated books in twentieth-century documentary practices. In this context, he is currently completing a dissertation entitled “Experiments in Belief: Chris Marker and the Technics of Documentary,” which traces the French film essayist’s varied visual works and decisively collaborative networks of the 1950s and 60s.

Jayson’s work has received generous support from the USC Graduate School, the Department of French, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and the Del Amo Foundation. Jayson has also received the Borchard Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Anne Friedberg Memorial Grant from the VSRI. In 2022/23, he participated as a graduate fellow with the NEH-VSRI Images Out of Time Seminar, an interdisciplinary humanities initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities aimed a developing a new undergraduate curriculum for visual studies at USC. 

• M.A. California Institute of the Arts, 2012
• BA University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010