Rate My Professor Jess Pacella

Dr Jess Pacella is a Lecturer in Creative Industries in the School of Humanities, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities at Adelaide University. She has taught across cultural studies, screen studies, and creative industries at the University of South Australia for over ten years. Her research interests lie at the intersection of festivals and creative industry ecologies and policy, creative labour, the significance of material and archival objects, and film festival curation. She is currently collaborating on a research project on the intersection of aging and gender for women in the South Australian music sector. Dr Pacella was the research lead on a project on queer festival archival history and collaborated on research projects on film festivals and contemporary employment for creative and cultural workers in Australia, as well as arts festival volunteer engagement. In 2020, she completed a post-doctoral appointment which assessed various local and global policy responses to COVID-19 for arts and cultural workers and the creative sector.

Dr Pacella is the current co-curator of the Adelaide Queer Film Festival. Her work has been published in Cultural Trends and Continuum. Key publications include Pacella, J., & Richards, S. (2025). A queer feast of memories: using archives in festival research. Continuum, 39(1), 117-133; Luckman, S., Jaworski, K., Ghosh, R., Kosmina, B., Richards, S., Stratton, J., & Pacella, J. (2025). Culture in practice. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 39(1), 1-12; Richards, S., Pacella, J., & Munro, K. (2023). Comradery and the arts: experiences of senior volunteers in a festival city. Journal of Festival Studies, 5, 326-355; Richards, S., & Pacella, J. (2022). 'We need to keep making stuff, regardless of what the situation is': creativity and the film festival sector during COVID-19. Arts and the Market, 13(1), 20-32; Pacella, J., Luckman, S., & O'Connor, J. (2021). Fire, pestilence and the extractive economy: cultural policy after cultural policy. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 40-51; Pacella, J. (2011). Crikey, it's commodified!: an investigation into ANZAC Day: the next Nike?. Social Alternatives, 30(2), 26-29; and Pacella, J., Luckman, S., & O'Connor, J. (2021). CP3 Working Paper 1: Keeping creative: assessing the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on the art and cultural sector & responses to it by governments, cultural agencies and the sector. She co-authored the Editor's introduction: shifting cultures in Social Alternatives (2011) and contributed to book chapters including 'Whose festival?': examining questions of participation, access and ownership in rural festivals (2015) and 'Taste'-ing festivals: understanding constructions of rural identity through community festivals (2014).