Sheila Petty is a Canadian settler and professor of media studies at the University of Regina. She received her Doctorat ès Lettres in 1987 from Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris, France. She has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity and nation in African and African diasporic screen media, and has curated film, television and digital media exhibitions for galleries across Canada. Over the course of her career, she has advocated for the “de-westernizing” of African film studies in favor of thinking about how time and space arise from the artist’s cultural heritage, values and identity, thus foregrounding Indigenous voices in theoretical and methodological approaches.

Sheila Petty is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema, (Wayne State University Press, 2008); editor of A Call to Action: the Films of Ousmane Sembene, (Greenwood/Praeger/Flicks Books, 1996) and co-editor of Expressions culturelles des francophonies (Éditions Nota bene, 2008); Canadian Cultural Poesis, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) and Directory of World Cinema: Africa (Intellect Books, 2015). Her current research focuses on Amazigh and North African cinemas, and issues of citizenship and immigration in French cinemas. She is currently writing a book on Algerian feminist filmmaker, Habiba Djahnine (Edinburgh University Press).