• “Meaning in the Margins: Boutique Distribution and the Contemporary Art House Film Market,” Doctoral Dissertation, UW-Madison, 2024. Link.

• “Stream of Rivals: Licensing Coalitions and Art House Film Streaming Platforms,” Media Industries, Forthcoming 2025.

• “Two Friends: Circumstances of a Historic Feminist Collaboration,” ReFocus: The Films of Jane Campion. Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Link.

• “Moana’s roundabout voyage back to the multiplex: A guest post by Nicholas Benson and Zachary Zahos,” for David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Observations on Film Art blog, January 2025.

  • A production history of Moana 2, from its origins as a streaming series to its eventual release as a theatrical film, doubling as a contemporary analysis of Disney’s distribution strategy.

• “Where the movie lovers are: A guest post by Matt St. John and Zachary Zahos,” for Observations on Film Art, September 2024.

  • An analysis of the current state of U.S. independent film distribution and exhibition, written in response to a Variety column by Owen Gleiberman.

For more media industry analysis, see my Playback articles on Netflix’s international film acquisitions and on Martin Scorsese vs. Marvel.

I maintain a newsletter devoted to cinema over at Substack and post shorter blurbs on recent film viewing on Letterboxd.

For more, see the following program notes I wrote for the UW-Cinematheque blog, most of which are archived as PDF files:

• “The Re-discovery of Lafcadio,” January 2025.

• “Repetition and Recursion: The Films of Larry Gottheim,” February 2023.

• “The Syzygies of A Dim Valley,” October 2021.

• “Meet the New Boss: Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines,” September 2021.

• “Tropical Malady: The Multivalent Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul,” November 2019.

• “Behind the Blue Door: Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?” September 2019.

• “Back Street: The Case of John M. Stahl,” January 2019.

• “Powers Greater Than Any Empire: Black Narcissus,” November 2018.

• “The Chase: An Essential Noir Doubles Down on the Unsavory,” January 2018.

• “The Music of Something Wild,” September 2017.

• “A Rediscovered Gem: Bless Their Little Hearts,” September 2017.

Back in the mid-2010s, I was film critic for The Ithaca Voice, writing mostly about the latest indie or international releases. You can find these reviews archived at my author page.

Recently I have been writing about archival materials stored at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and on the Media History Digital Library. In addition to getting the word out about these institutions’ collections, this writing allows me to quickly publish a first draft of larger research projects.

• “Lost & Found: Jean Béranger’s ‘Lafcadio’ (1948),” Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, 2025.

• “New at the Media History Digital Library: The Wilkinson Pressbook Collection,” Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, 2025.

I am an experienced copywriter of newsletters, articles, blurbs, press kits—anything that calls for me to research, report, and write about something interesting. Recent copywriting include the following:

• Vilas Voice alumni newsletter, Department of Communication Arts, UW-Madison, 2022.

• Various blurbs for the 2019, 2020, and 2022 installments of the Wisconsin Film Festival and for the UW-Cinematheque.

• Milestone Films press kits for The Daughter of Dawn (Norbert A. Myles, 1920) and Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985).