Jess Pacella

Dr Jessica Pacella is a Lecturer in Creative Industries, and has been teaching across cultural studies, screen studies and creative industries for over 15 years. Her current research interests operate across the intersection of festivals and creative industry ecologies and policy, creative labour, the significance of material and archival objects, and film festival curation. She is currently collaborating on a research project on the intersection of aging and gender for women in the South Australian music sector. She was research lead on a project on queer festival archival history, and collaborated on research projects on film festivals and contemporary employment for creative and cultural workers in Australia, and arts festival volunteer engagement. Her work has been published in Cultural Trends and Continuum. She completed a post-doctoral appointment in 2020 which assessed various local and global policy responses to COVID-19 for arts and cultural workers, and the creative sector. She is also the current inaugural Chair of the Queer Archive Collective of South Australia (QACSA) and the co-curator of the Adelaide Queer Film Festival (AQFF). Cultural Studies, Screen Studies, and Creative Industries. My research expertise spans multiple qualitative approaches, including photo elicitation, archival analysis, and textual analysis, and I work at the intersections of festivals and creative industry ecologies and policy, creative labour, the significance of material and archival objects, and contemporary film festival curatorial practice.

[2025] Luckman, S., Jaworski, K., Ghosh, R., Kosmina, B., Richards, S., Stratton, J., & Pacella, J. (2025). Culture in practice. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 39(1), 1-12. [2025] Pacella, J., & Richards, S. (2025). A queer feast of memories: using archives in festival research. Continuum, 39(1), 117-133. [2023] Richards, S., Pacella, J., & Munro, K. (2023). Comradery and the arts: experiences of senior volunteers in a festival city. Journal of Festival Studies, 5, 326-355. [2025] Munro, K., Pacella, J., & Romeo Richards, S. (2025). Queer Visions: The expanded film festival and non-traditional screening format (Extent: 6 pages) [Exhibition]. Australia: University of South Australia. [2025] Pacella, J., & Romeo Richards, S. (2025). Adelaide Queer Film Festival (Extent: Fi