Jacqueline Najuma Stewart^[1] is a University of Chicago professor of cinema studies^[2] and director of the nonprofit arts organization, Black Cinema House.^[3] She has written about the history of African Americans in filmmaking in Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005), co-authored, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015), and with Charles Musser co-curated the DVD set Pioneers of African-American Cinema (2016).^[4] Stewart has served on the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) of the Library of Congress and chaired the NFPB Diversity Task Force.^[5] In 2005, she founded the South Side Home Movie Project, which collects, preserves, as a cultural and historical resource, the homemade films of residents of South Side, Chicago, together with interviews of creators.^[6]

In September 2019, Stewart also became the first African-American host of Turner Classic Movies, as host for Silent Sunday Nights.^[5] Taking a sabbatical from the university, in 2021 she was named the inaugural artistic director at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.^[7][8]

Stewart was raised on Chicago's South Side and graduated from Kenwood Academy High School.^[9] She received her BA from Stanford University, and her AM and PhD both from the University of Chicago (UC).^[10] She taught at the university from 1999 to 2006, and then moved to an associate professorship at Northwestern University, returning to UC in 2013.^[11] In 2018, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[12] In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.^[11]

On July 6, 2022, the Academy Museum Of Motion Pictures announced Stewart's appointment as director and president of the institution.^[13][14]