Chase Joynt

Joined UVic Gender Studies in 2019

My research and teaching sit at the intersection of cinema and media studies, gender and feminist studies, documentary film production, trans studies, and queer theory.

My documentary features THE NEST and STATE OF FIRSTS both premiered in 2025 at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively. My feature, FRAMING AGNES (Kino Lorber), was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator and NEXT Audience Awards. The film also won the GLAAD Award for Outstanding Documentary. With Aisling Chin-Yee, I directed NO ORDINARY MAN (Oscilloscope), which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, the film has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, I directed episodes of TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES (Netflix) and my episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing. I am the co-author of the Lambda Literary Award Finalist YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (Coach House) with Mike Hoolboom and BOYS DON’T CRY (Queer Cinema Classics) with Morgan M Page. My latest book, VANTAGE POINTS (Arsenal Pulp), was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a 2024 Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle. 

Research Interests

•   Cinema and Media
•   Art and Aesthetics
•   Practice-Based Research
•   Transgender Studies
•   Queer Theory

Courses Taught

•  Feminist Art and Institutional Critique
•  Queer and Trans Film
•  Trans Theory
•  Sex Panics on Screen
•  Queer and Trans Cultural Production
•  Pop Culture and Social Media
•  Gender, Social Change and Documentary
•  Gender, Power and Difference 

Selected Publications

FILM and TV

2025 | State of Firsts // documentary feature (Director, Executive Producer), 93 mins
2025 | The Nest // documentary feature (Co-Director and Co-Writer), 89 mins
2022 | Framing Agnes // documentary feature (Director, Producer, Writer), 75 mins
2021 | Two Sentence Horror Stories // Season 3, Episode 306 (Director), Netflix and CW
2020 | Two Sentence Horror Stories // Season 2, Episode 203 (Director), Netflix and CW
2020 | No Ordinary Man // documentary feature (Co-Director) 84 mins
2018 | Framing Agnes // documentary short (Co-Director | Producer) 19 mins
2016 | Between You and Me // documentary short (Director | Producer) 10 mins
2016 | Genderize // documentary short (Director | Producer) 14 mins
2014 | STEALTH // experimental video documentary (Co-Director | Producer) 20 mins
2013 | Murder in Passing // serial-narrative feature (Performer | Collaborator)
2012 | I’m Yours // experimental video documentary (Director | Editor) 5 mins
2012 | Akin // experimental video documentary (Director | Editor) 9 mins
2012 | RESISTERECTOMY // 4-part documentary media installation (Co-creator)

Schilt, K. and C. Joynt. Conceptualizing Agnes: Exemplary Cases and the Disciplines of Gender. Under contract with Duke University Press (in progress)
Joynt, Chase. 2024. Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Joynt, Chase and Morgan M Page. 2022. Boys Don’t Cry. McGill-Queens University Press.
Joynt, Chase. and Mike Hoolboom. 2016. You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death and Transition. Coach House Books. 

Joynt C. and N. Bhanji. 2020. “The Complex Genealogies of Trans Studies in the Academy.” Trans Lives in a Global(izing) World: Rights, Identities, and Politics: 165-177.

Jacobsen, Kai, and Chase Joynt. "Showing Up by Stepping Out: On Teaching and Being Trans in the Classroom." The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61.7 (2022).
Singh, Julietta, and Chase Joynt. "On Nesting." Journal of Visual Culture 20, no. 2 (2021): 418-432.
Joynt, Chase, and Jules Rosskam. "Toward a Trans Method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life." Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1 (2021): 11-20.
Dyer, Hannah, Julia Sinclair-Palm, Chase Joynt, Miranda Yeo, and Calla Tait. "Aesthetic Expressions of Queer Kinship in Children’s Drawings." Journal of Canadian Studies 54, no. 2-3 (2020): 526-543.
Joynt, Chase. and Harsin Drager, E., 2019, December. “Condition Verified: On Photography, Trans Visibility, and Legacies of the Clinic.” In Arts (Vol. 8, No. 4, p. 150). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
Joynt, Chase. 2018. “Film Review: Real Boy.” Men and Masculinities. pp.761-763.
Rosskam, Jules. 2018. “Making Trans Cinema: A Roundtable Discussion with Felix Endara, Reina Gossett, Chase Joynt, Jess Mac, and Madsen Minax.” Somatechnics, 8(1), pp.14-26.
Dyer, Hannah and Chase Joynt. 2017. “Aestheticizing trauma and the remains of childhood secrets: a conversation with Chase Joynt’s Akin.” Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 22(2), 212-219.
Joynt, Chase and Kristen Schilt. 2015. “Anxiety at the Archive.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 2(4): 635-644.

•  Film Studies Association of Canada
•  National Women’s Studies Association
•  American Studies Association
•  Sexuality Studies Association
•  Society for Cinema and Media Studies
•  Center for Feminist Research, York University
•  Trans Feminist Action Caucus, York University