mm

Melissa Oliver-Powell

Melissa Oliver-Powell (she/her) is a lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, whose research focuses on issues of mothering, politics, and social justice in film. Melissa holds a PhD in Film Studies from UCL, and has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections on topics including representation of abortion, mothering subjectivities, mothering, migration and racism, and reproductive justice, austerity, and the welfare state in British, French, Senegalese and American film. Her debut monograph, Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958-1969 was published with Berghahn Books in 2022.

MAI CONTRIBUTIONS

Oliver-Powell considers practices of care in the personal, artistic, and working relationships between filmmakers and their subjects.

Newsletter

Feeling inspired by MAI? Dedicated to intersectional gender politics in visual culture? Want to keep your feminist imagination on fire? MAI newsletter will help refresh your zeal for feminism with first-hand news on our new content. 

Subscribe below to stay up-to-date.

* We'll never share your email address with any third parties.

WHO SUPPORTS US

The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.

However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:


Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers

Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey