Rate My Professor Lisa Bode

Dr. Lisa Bode is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She earned a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of New South Wales. Her research specializations encompass visual and special effects in cinema, screen acting and stardom, the cultural reception of synthetic media including synthespians and deepfakes, digital filmmaking technologies such as motion capture and digital face-replacement, film history from silent and early sound eras to the digital present, platform visual effects, vernacular visual effects in social media, and the historical transformations in performance styles and audience reception. Bode is an affiliate of the Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies and the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing. She co-founded the Visual Effects Research Network in 2020 with Associate Professor Leon Gurevitch to foster open-access research, debate, mentorship, and collaboration in visual effects scholarship.

Bode authored Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017), which historicizes screen performance amid technological changes in Hollywood filmmaking. She co-edited the August 2021 special issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies on Digital Faces and Deepfakes on Screen and is writing a monograph Deepfakes and Digital Bodies for Rutgers University Press. Key publications include chapters such as From Holy Grail to Deepfake: The Evolving Digital Face on Screen (Faces on Screen: New Approaches, Edinburgh University Press, 2022), The Uncanny Valley (The Animation Studies Reader, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and Fleshing It Out: Prosthetic Makeup Effects, Motion Capture and the Reception of Performance (Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); journal articles like Deepfaking Keanu: YouTube Deepfakes, Platform Visual Effects, and the Complexity of Reception (Convergence, 2021), It's a Fake!: Early and Late Incredulous Viewers, Trick Effects, and CGI (Film History, 2018), and No Longer Themselves? Framing Digitally Enabled Posthumous Performance (Cinema Journal, 2010). She serves on the editorial boards of Animation: Key Films / Filmmakers (Bloomsbury Academic) and Animation Studies, the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Animation Studies. Bode has supervised 15 completed PhD and Master's theses and received University of Queensland funding including the New Staff Research Start-Up Fund (2010-2012) for screen acting and digital filmmaking processes and Early Career Researcher grant (2009) for posthumous performances using doubles. She delivered the seminar Masks, Simulations, and Elusive Sparks: Four Decades of the Digital Human Face in Cinema (2018) and spoke at the Digital Bodies and Devices symposium on Looker (2018).