Jessica Balanzategui

Core Members

Dr Jessica Balanzategui is a Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University. Her research addresses intersections between entertainment cultures, technological, and industrial change. Her specialities are streaming video on demand, emergent genres in participatory digital cultures, horror, weird and Gothic genres, and screen genres for and about children. Jessica uses a diverse range of methods including streaming interface analysis, policy and archival research, and child audience research combining ethnographic, audience, and child development research strategies. Her work has been widely published in leading international journals such as New Media and Society, Convergence, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Television and New Media, and her monographs include The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018) and Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres, and Intergenerational Viewing (with Baker and Sandars, Routledge, 2023). She is the Founding Editor of Amsterdam University Press’s Horror and Gothic Media Cultures series, and was awarded the 2020 AFI Research Collection Fellowship for her archival research on Australian children’s TV. Jessica is a regular expert commentator on ABC radio on topics related to entertainment media, and she collaborates regularly with the GLAM sector – for instance, she was lead organiser of ACMI’s “Mapping Global Horror” and was a key research consultant on their “Goddesses” exhibition (2023).