Fabrizio Cilento, Ph.D.

Fabrizio Cilento is Professor of Film and Digital Media at Messiah University, where he has taught since 2010. He is the author of L’altrove/Somewhere Else, a poetry collection, and two academic books: Reenactment: Hybrid Documentaries and Fictional True Stories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and An Investigative Cinema: Politics and Modernization in Italian, French, and American Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Dr. Cilento earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as a B.A. and M.A. in Performing Arts from his native city of Florence, Italy. His scholarly articles have appeared in Christian Scholar’s Review, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Fast Capitalism, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, California Italian Studies, Comedy Studies, Teorija in praksa, Seismopolite, Chronica Mundi, Eastern European Bulletin, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. He has contributed chapters and essays to the edited volumes Pier Paolo Pasolini: American Perspectives, The Cinema of Marco Tullio Giordana, The Moro Affair: Memories and Narrations, The Cinema of Ettore Scola, and Past and Present in Italian Cinema. He has also published poems in Nodo Sottile, Beat, beat…hurrà, Rotte Metropolitane, Sagarana, La Nazione, and other literary journals and anthologies. He has served as Chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Translation/Publication Committee (2021-2024) and Chair of the Film Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association (2020-Present), and is a member of the Advisory Board of Film Matters (Intellect, 2020-Present). He teaches summer courses on location at the Sant’Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy, and Gordon College in Orvieto, Italy.

• Ph.D., Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media. University of Washington 
• M.A. in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media. University of Washington. 
• B.A. and M.A. in Performing Arts. University of Florence, Italy. 

• COMM 328 Methods and Issues in Film Studies
• COMM 382 History and Theory of Digital Media
• COMM 327/IDNW 200 Latin American Cinema
• COMM 282 21st Century New Media Literacy
• COMM 282 Science Fiction Cinema
• COMM 252 Film History II: 1960 - Present
• COMM 251 Film History I: Origins - 1960
• COMM 217 Introduction to Film
• IDCC 260: Italian Cityscapes and the Flow of Life
• IDFY 101 From Borges to HTML

• Film Studies Digital Media
• Transmedia Adaptations
• Stars and Stardom Studies
• Television Studies, Memory Studies
• Historiography
• Italian Studies
• French Studies
• American Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Poetry and Literature
• Performing Arts
• Globalization
• Creative Writing
• Multimedia Storytelling
• Teaching with Technologies