Ida Yoshinaga

Maui-raised sansei Ida Yoshinaga is a non-traditional scholar of film, television, and media studies working at the intersection of genre theory; creative writing pedagogy; cultural studies; and cinematic production studies.  A hybrid scholar-practitioner of the speculative/fantastic arts, she specializes in cultural screen stories including community-engaged movies and network/cable/streaming shows, with a focus on story development, cross-cultural adaptation, and the politics of cinematic pre-production as well as of critical reception, as these processes apply to the scripted (fictional) screenplay form. Her work can be found in the collection of thinkpieces on science-fiction/fantasy (SFF) studies in the new millennium, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (MIT Press 2022), which she co-edited with Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan; The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2022), where she put together an introductory roundtable of feminist, queer, and trans SFF fiction authors from diverse backgrounds; The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairytale Cultures (2018) in which she applied the concept of transmedia/storyworlds to fairytale narratives; and journals such as Narrative Culture, Marvels & Tales, Science Fiction Studies, The New Ray Bradbury Review, The Journal of the Sussex Center for Folklore, and Science Fiction Film and Television, the last for which she is one of a team of three main editors.

Vice President of the oldest North American science-fiction studies professional organization, the Science Fiction Research Association, Dr. Yoshinaga currently sits on the editorial collectives/boards of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Peter Lang Publishing's World Science Fiction Series, and well as serves as the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion co-editor of the new International Journal of Disney Studies. She has won the RD Mullen Ph.D. grant for speculative-fiction archival research from Science Fiction Studies journal; the Walter James Miller Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; and the Grace K. J. Abernethy Creative Writing Award from her alma mater, the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. She is producer of the award-winning animated short film from the Pacific directed by Vili Hereniko and Gavin Arucan, "Sina Ma Tinirau (Sina and Tinirau)," an adaptation of Rotuman folklore, and consultant for an upcoming film on Samoan screenwriter and playwright John Kneubuhl.