Gino Canella is a researcher, educator, and documentary filmmaker. He is currently an assistant professor of journalism in the School of Communication at Emerson College.

Gino’s research and creative projects explore media activism, visual culture, and labor. He produces films with grassroots organizers and studies how collaborative media production has the potential to foster meaningful relationships among people fighting for justice. He is interested in how the affective nature of media complements community organizing and promotes democratic citizenship.

Gino has traveled the world as a researcher and filmmaker. In 2012, he filmed, wrote, and edited his first documentary film, The British Pub, Inc., which aired on public television in the U.K. In December 2016, he co-directed a documentary in Dakar, Senegal about a community theater troupe that is mixing performance art and religious expression. The film was selected for screening at the 2019 Ethnografilm Festival in Paris, France. His multimodal dissertation at CU Boulder included the 23-minute documentary Radical Labor, which detailed how union organizers in Colorado pursue economic and racial justice. It was published online by Roar Magazine in March 2018. Activist Media, his book based on this work, was published in May 2022 by Rutgers University Press. His latest film, Front Line (2021), featured the historic nursing strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts.

He earned a Master of Arts in Media Studies at Temple University ('13), and a Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder ('18).