Constance Penley is a professor of Film and Media Studies and the founding director, and past co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and recently celebrating its 100th issue. 

Penley is recognized as a founder of the media subfields of feminist film theory, porn studies, fan studies, and environmental media.

Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography, a memoir of thirty years of learning how to teach a subject many thought could not and should not be taught. Penley is the editor or co-editor of several influential and field-changing collections, including Feminism and Film Theory; Male Trouble; Technoculture; Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction; The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender, and most recently, from The Feminist Press, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, (trans. German and Spanish) with Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young.

Essays considered classics include “The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary,” “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,” “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Pee-wee: Consumerism and Sexual Terror,” “Brownian Motion: Women: Tactics and Technology,” “Spaced Out: Remembering Christa McAuliffe,” “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture,” “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” “A Feminist Teaching Pornography? That’s Like Scopes Teaching Evolution!’” and, more recently, “Images, Ethics, and Technology: Collision in a Courtroom.”

Penley’s large public art projects include PrimetimeArt by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, first commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles in 1995 as In the Name of the Place and rebooted and reimagined by Red Bull Studios in NYC in 2016 as TOTAL PROOF, and Biospheria: an environmental opera. 

She won the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award for “DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea” and co-produced HBO’s Porn 101 with Katie Morgan, continuing her dual research focus on popular science and popular sex. Other awards include the Kenneth Burke Society Prize for Excellence in Rhetorical Studies and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Penley’s current and future collaborative and public-facing research is enabled by her work with the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (President) and the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade association (Board of Directors).

CUCFA is an independent faculty advocacy organization that serves all ten UC campuses on economic and employment conditions, academic freedom, and shared governance. It gathers and disseminates information on issues before California government’s legislative and executive branches, other relevant state units dealing with higher education, the University administration, and the Board of Regents.

The FSC’s mission is to protect the rights and freedoms of both the workers and businesses in the adult industry. Its vision is a world in which body sovereignty is recognized, sexual expression is destigmatized, and sex work is decriminalized. Penley is proud to be the first academic elected to the FSC Board of Directors.

Last but not least, as a fan of fandom, T’Penley will continue to be inspired by the slash fan community as embodied in Escapade Con, now in its 34th year, and Transformative Works and Cultures, where she serves on the Editorial Board.