Saige Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies in the School of Humanities at Adelaide University, where she also serves as one of the School's Graduate Research Coordinators.  She is also one of the Associate Directors of the Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) Research Centre.
 
Saige is a film and visual culture studies scholar who works in American, European and World Cinema contexts, often using phenomenological philosophy as well as other film-philosophical frameworks to make 'sense' of the cinema.  She is particularly interested in issues relating to the embodiment of film/media aesthetics, cinema, the environment and the non-human.  She also teaches and conducts research in areas relating to popular film genres, horror studies, experimental film/media, film production design, art and inter-mediality.
 
Saige's first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2016.  In this book, she explores the parallels between philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought, film-phenomenology and the baroque, establishing the baroque as its own distinct cinema of the senses.  Building on her interest in film, philosophy and the body, she has edited two special journal issues relating to these topics: "Materialising Absence in Film and Media" (with Nadine Boljkovac), published in Screening the Past (Issue 43 2018) and a special issue of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media on "Screening the Artist" (co-edited with Lucio Crispino) (Issue 23 2022).  Saige's research also features in a number of edited book collections, with contributions exploring the work of contemporary filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Sofia Coppola, Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Alex Garland and Ari Aster. 
 
Saige's second scholarly monograph in process explores the embodiment and ethics of a contemporary cinema of poetry, also drawing critical inspiration from a range of historic filmmakers, philosophers and critics affiliated with the poetic including Antonin Artaud, Maya Deren, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Julia Kristeva, among others.  Publications arising from Saige's work on film and the poetic appear in international film/critical theory journals such as Film-Philosophy, Paragraph and Projections. 
 
Prior to joining the University of South Australia in 2012, Saige taught screen, media and cultural studies subjects at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  She is a former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne who has helped to curate a number of film programs, exhibitions, screen and art related events for the general public.  In 2023, she collaborated with the Adelaide Film Festival to deliver the "Screen Conversations" series of talks with Australian filmmakers.
 
Saige is an experiened PhD supervisor.  She welcomes queries from potential PhD and Masters students looking to pursue a project relevant to her research interests in film and media aesthetics.