Victoria Duckett

Victoria H. Duckett is an international scholar, film curator and teacher who is currently Senior Lecturer in Screen at Deakin University. Exploring forgotten, overlooked and elided histories, Victoria advocates for women’s pioneering role in the emergence of the screen industries. Joining this history to the related histories of art and media, she is author of the award winning book, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film. A founding participant in the Women and the Silent Screen conference (Utrecht, 1994), Victoria was elected to Women and Film History International Steering Committee (2008-2015). During this time, she co-edited the open access collection Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives, brought the biennial Women and the Silent Screen international conference to Australia for the first time (VII, 2013) and co-edited the collection “Women and the Silent Screen” in the online journal Screening the Past.

A curator who works collaboratively to ensure the visibility of women in early film, Victoria has recently partnered with Richard Abel (University of Michigan) in a French Stars series at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (focusing on the Queen of the Paris Music Hall, Mistinguett, 2019 and forthcoming 2021). Next year at Pordenone she will also curate the first program around the comic actress Gabrielle Réjane. Victoria also curated the first Sarah Bernhardt film retrospective for Cinema Ritrovato  in Bologna, 2006 (“Performing Passions: Sarah Bernhardt and the Silent Screen”).  

Victoria is currently completing a new book–Media matriarchs: The French stage celebrity and the development of transnational film –for the University of California Press (2021). She is on the founding editorial board of the journal Feminist Media Histories (University of California Press) and on the editorial board of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (SAGE).