Ida Yoshinaga

Maui-raised sansei Ida Yoshinaga is a non-traditional scholar of film, television, and media studies working at the intersection of genre theory; cultural studies; and cinematic production studies.  A hybrid scholar-practitioner of the speculative/fantastic arts, she specializes in cultural screen stories including community-engaged movies and community-facing network/cable/streaming shows, with a focus on story development, cross-cultural adaptation, and the politics of pre-production as well as of cultural reception, as these processes apply to the scripted (fictional) screenplay form. Her work can be found in the collection of thinkpieces on science-fiction/fantasy (SFF) studies in the new millennium, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (MIT Press 2022), which she co-edited with Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan; The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2022), where she put together an introductory roundtable of feminist, queer, and trans SFF fiction authors from different cultural and regional backgrounds; The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairytale Cultures (2018) in which she applied the concept of transmedia/storyworlds to fairytale narratives; and journals such as Narrative Culture, Marvels & Tales, Science Fiction Studies, The New Ray Bradbury Review, The Journal of the Sussex Center for Folklore, and Science Fiction Film and Television, the last for which she is one of a team of five main editors.

Dr. Yoshinaga currently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Studies journal, Peter Lang Publishing's World Science Fiction Series, and the new International Journal of Disney Studies. She has won the RD Mullen Ph.D. grant for speculative-fiction archival research from Science Fiction Studies journal; the Walter James Miller Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; the Grace K. J. Abernethy Creative Writing Award from her alma mater, the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa; and the Crown Prince (Emperor) Akihito Scholarship.