It is with great sadness we share that Lesley Stern, professor emerita and former chair of the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts, died January 29, 2021. She was 71.
A writer celebrated most recently for work that bridges literary non-fiction and cultural criticism, Lesley Stern’s reputation was first established through her foundational contributions to film theory and history over more than four decades, forging a distinctively experimental approach to writing in its relationship to film, performance, and a range of cultural practices that extended to cooking and gardening.
Stern was a pivotal figure in the establishment of cinema and film studies as an academic discipline in Australia before shifting the base of her career, at the turn of the century, to Southern California. Here, she embraced “gardening in a strange land” (the title of an unfinished manuscript) while contributing to the experimental ethos of the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts from 2000 to 2013.
During her California period, Stern continued to write about film in distinctive prose form while increasingly extending her attention to other topics and projects. With the San Diego-based artist and Department of Visual Arts MFA alumna Doris Bittar ’93, Stern and her husband Jeffrey Minson helped to found an ESL program called Teach & Learn Literacy, a program that mentored newly arrived Syrian refugees. Stern expanded the program to include classes in Syrian cooking, and with artist Ruth Wallen, she became active in the San Diego Shambhala Center, where she practiced meditation and studied ikebana.
In essays and books about smoking, gardens, backyard chickens, and the science and art of living with chronic illness, Stern honed a distinctive approach to fictocriticism, a style that blends ethnography, memoir, narrative and theory in dialog with an interdisciplinary circle of renowned writers, including Kathleen Stewart, Eileen Myles, Leslie Dick, Donna Haraway, and Lauren Berlant.
Lesley Stern was born and raised on a farm in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1950s. She was awarded an Honours degree in English language and literature from University of London (now University of Zimbabwe) in Zimbabwe’s capital city Harare, while teaching at a night school and polytechnic. In Zimbabwe, she wrote fiction and engaged in intensive reading and writing groups centered on a journal that included criticism as well as poetry and fiction.
Stern left Harare to pursue a degree in theater at Glasgow University, but was drawn to film culture, around which there was not yet a fully established academic discipline. Her interest in film drew her to London, where she conducted research at the British Film Institute (for which she was briefly a manager of regional film theaters) and became enmeshed in the influential film theory then converging around Screen magazine.
At the same time, Stern began engaging in feminist theory through writing for the legendary journal m/f and attending seminars at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where a nascent program emphasized film theory’s connection to practice; this focus would have an enduring impact on Stern’s approach to writing as a creative endeavor.
She was recruited from her position at the British Film Institute to a teaching position at La Trobe University in Australia to help launch an academic program in the new field of cinema studies. Having become enmeshed in the distinctive independent film scene of Australia, intersecting with feminism and the left journal Intervention, and having successfully established a cinema studies degree program at La Trobe, Stern left the academy for two years to work in Japan, where she wrote scripts and worked in film and video production on her own projects, as well as for directors such as John Hughes.
A position at Murdoch University in Perth drew her back to Australia, where Stern’s writing took a turn away from the more programmatic style favored by most writers working in film theory and history, and toward the novel and ethnographic, and literary-nonfiction prose forms that had been part of her earliest formation as a writer.
Questions of subjectivity and readership became a focus of Stern’s craft, as she moved from Perth to Sydney for a position at the University of New South Wales. She continued to bridge disciplines by teaching courses in performance that spanned theater and film. Her writing, too, was multi-disciplined, cutting across cultural studies, photography and independent film practice in essays. She addressed topics including the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative while helping to set up an independent filmmakers association, participating in a feminist writing group, and holding a position on the board of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies.
“The Scorsese Connection,” her book on the director described by one reviewer as “the best, most imaginative, and bravest book written on Scorsese,” was written during her time in Sydney and based on the dissertation she wrote for a Ph.D. in film studies, which she received from the University of Sydney in 1995.
After a fellowship year at the Getty Research Institute and a brief period at UC Irvine, Stern began teaching at UC San Diego in July 2000 and was a pioneer in launching the Art Practice concentration to the department’s Art History, Theory and Criticism Ph.D. program. The concentration continues to support the kind of work across the theory-practice divide for which her writing stands as both foundational and exemplary.
A continual mentor to faculty and students even in retirement, she will be remembered as fearlessly championing an approach to writing that spanned activism and the academy, bridged disciplinary boundaries while forging new fields, and conveyed her global influence.
Selected books include, “Diary of a Detour” (Duke University Press, 2020), “Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing” (Caboose, 2012), “The Smoking Book” (University of Chicago Press, 1999), “Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance” (co-edited with George Kouvaros for University of Washington Press, 2011) and the aforementioned “The Scorsese Connection” (Indiana University Press, 1996).
Lesley Stern is survived by her husband Jeffrey Minson of San Diego, and a brother, Duncan Addison, of England.
This past fall the Department of Visual Arts was honored to virtually celebrate the publication of Stern’s latest book “Diary of a Detour” — a memoir of living with a chronic form of cancer. In lieu of flowers, the department asks to honor Stern by viewing her visit, recorded October 9, 2020.
