UCLA REMAP is pleased to announce that UCLA Film, Television and Digital Media doctoral student Zama Dube has been chosen as the 2021 recipient of the annual Marty Sklar Entertainment Innovation Fellowship. Dube will participate in major collaborative projects at REMAP that interweave the physical and digital worlds to share new kinds of stories, and engage with the legacy and future of themed entertainment.
The theme for this inaugural 2021 Fellowship is Leadership in Equity and Innovation. It focuses on research and production that use emerging technologies and alternative modes of making to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in creative and scholarly work within the UCLA TFT community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Established in 2020 to support high-achieving UCLA students to work with REMAP, the Fellowship was made possible by a leadership gift to UCLA TFT from the family of Martin A. Sklar (1934–2017), a UCLA alumnus widely considered “the Jiminy Cricket of Imagineering,” and funds from the UCLA Chancellor‘s Centennial Scholars Match Initiative.
During his 53-year career at Disney, Mr. Sklar played pivotal roles in the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the It’s a Small World attraction, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris and Disney-MGM Studios, among many others, and upon retirement was honored with a window on Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. His pioneering work in themed entertainment demonstrates how artistic creativity can drive engineering innovation at a large scale, consistent with REMAP’s goals for its research and student experiences.
In her third year in the Cinema and Media Studies PhD program, Zama Dube holds an MA from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and previously worked in the South African broadcasting industry.
Dube describes her theoretical lens as informed by African feminist thinking, queer diaspora studies, decolonial studies and Black visual cultures. Her research aims to contribute to a legacy within visual cultures, that has often been preoccupied with interrogating notions of the spectacle, the politics of representation and the possibility of a Black feminist gaze. More specifically, her research interests are preoccupied with making sense of the subversive media practices of Black women media-makers in the African diaspora. Her research does this by centering Black feminisms as a generative theoretical tool and epistemology for envisioning a radical, decolonial and a fundamentally liberatory Black visual aesthetic. Past honors include The Teshome Gabriel Memorial Award, the Mariame Kaba Graduate Fellowship in Black Feminist Research, and membership in the UCLA chapter of the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.