Shana MacDonald

Dr. Shana MacDonald is Associate Professor in Communication Arts. Her interdisciplinary feminist research is situated between film, media, communication, and performance studies. She studies feminist, queer, and anti-racist social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, and visual culture as well as the rise of online hate, technology facilitated gender based violence, and disinformation online. Dr. MacDonald co-runs the online archive on Instagram @aesthetic.resistance and the Feminist Think Tank research group at the University of Waterloo. MacDonald co-directs the SIGNAL (Strategies for Intersectional Gender Justice, Networked Action, and Liberation) Network, an international group of scholars, activists, and policy makers addressing the problem of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. 

MacDonald is a series editor for Ohio State University Press’s Digital Feminist Resistance and on the editorial board of Women Studies Quarterly, and co-Editor in Chief for (Un)Disturbed: A Journal of Feminist Voices. She has published in Feminist Media Studies, Camera Obscura, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Media Histories, and Media Theory Journal. MacDonald is lead editor of Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices (2022) and a co-editor of Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies (2023). Her most recent book The Art of Memes in Feminist Digital Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2025) is now available. 

MacDonald is past-President of the Film and Media Association of Canada (2020-2022) and holds a PhD in Communication and Culture (2013), an MA in Cinema and Media Studies (2005) from York University, and a BFA in Image Arts (2001) from Ryerson University.