Join Academy Museum Exhibitions Curator Jessica Niebel and Assistant Curator J. Raúl Guzmán, with special guest scholar Susan Napier of Tufts University, in conversation on the impact and influence of the visionary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. This deep dive into the world of Miyazaki will take place inside his unprecedented retrospective exhibition Hayao Miyazaki followed by a brief Q&A in the Netflix Lounge.

Special Guests

Susan Napier

Susan Napier was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and started studying Japanese in high school. At the age of 17 she went to Japan and lived in Tokyo studying Japanese and teaching English. During her eight years living in Japan, she has completed academic work and appeared on Japanese television and in the movie Nankyoku monogatari where she played an American reporter interviewing a Japanese arctic explorer played by renowned actor Takakura Ken. Currently, Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Japanese at Tufts University. Previously, she held the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair at the University of Texas;  taught at the University of London; and been a visiting professor at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, the University of Sydney, and a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo. At Tufts, she teaches a variety of courses including a seminar on Hayao Miyazaki, a cross-cultural examination of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films, and a cross-cultural comparison of Walt Disney Studios and Studio Ghibli. Napier is the author of many articles and five books, the most recent of which is Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art, published in 2018 by Yale University Press. The book has been translated into ten languages. 

Jessica Niebel
Exhibitions Curator 

Jessica Niebel organized internationally touring exhibitions including Anime! High Art-Pop Culture (2008); Jim Rakete: The State of Things (2011); And the Oscar Goes to ... 85 Years of the Best Picture Academy Award (2012); and Theaters: Cinema Photography by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (2014) as curator at the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, where she was a member of the museum's award-winning film programming committee and edited numerous exhibition catalogues. For the Academy Museum, Niebel organized its inaugural temporary exhibitions Hayao Miyazaki (with Assistant Curator J. Raúl Guzmán) and The Path to Cinema: Highlights from the Richard Balzer Collection (with Assistant Curator Ana Santiago). Niebel holds a master's degree in media studies from the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany and studied media production at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.  

J. Raúl Guzmán
Assistant Curator  

J. Raúl Guzmán is a writer, curator, and scholar. He is part of the curatorial team for the Academy Museum’s inaugural temporary exhibitions Hayao Miyazaki and The Pixar Toy Story 3D Zoetrope with Exhibitions Curator Jessica Niebel, and worked on Installation: Pedro Almodóvar, part of the museum's Stories of Cinema exhibition. He is also part of the curatorial team for the upcoming temporary exhibition Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971. Before joining the Academy Museum, he served as Assistant Director of the New York-based Cinema Tropical, where he organized film series co-presented with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museo del Barrio, and the Museum of the Moving Image, among others. In 2015, he was selected as a Smithsonian Institution Latino Museum Studies Fellow. Previously he was a commercial and TV art director. Guzmán received his BA in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He holds an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University and an MA in Museum Studies from John Hopkins University.   

Image courtesy of Studio Ghibli/GKIDS