We are excited to announce that MSLCE and Communication Studies professor Aymar Jean (AJ) Escoffery will serve as our next program faculty director!
Dr. Escoffery is the Margaret Walker Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He teaches the MSLCE courses Understanding the Creative Industries and The Business of Streaming.
He co-founded OTV | Open Television, a research project and platform for intersectional television. OTV programs have received recognition from HBO, the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), New York Television Festival, City of Chicago, Streamy Awards, and Independent Filmmaker Project (Gotham Awards). Its programming partners have included the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum of Art, and City of Chicago, along with numerous galleries, community organizations, and universities.
He is the author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), and The Cookout: A Guide to AI: Ancestral Intelligence (For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025), and the co-author of the upcoming work, Media Reparations (Polity, 2027). His research & development has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, MacArthur Foundation, and Wallace Foundation, among others.
His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Social Media & Society, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Continuum, and Transformative Works and Cultures.
He has juried television and video for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others.
Dr. Escoffery’s blog, Televisual, is an archive of over 500 posts chronicling the rise of the web TV market, and he has written regular reports on TV and new media for Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and Tubefilter. He received PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
We have been lucky to have professor Rick Morris as our faculty director for the past year, and are thankful for his service. He will continue to teach his MSLCE course, Arts and Entertainment Law and Ethics.
While serving as faculty director, Dr. Escoffery will continue to teach his MSLCE courses. We are so grateful that Dr. Escoffery has accepted this role, and look forward to working together to support all of our community members.