With a career spanning multiple fields and passions, from playwriting to sacred jazz programming, Josslyn Luckett recently returned to television by joining the writing staff for the seventh and final season of Queen Sugar (OWN). She has been a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts since 2018 and in 2021 was appointed to the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. Her research interests include and combine media studies with jazz and improvisation studies, giving special attention to the intersection of race, gender, and social justice and to representations of Afrodiasporic spiritual practices in film and television. She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley, her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her earlier television credits include a four year stint on the writing staff of The Steve Harvey Show (WB) as well as an original teleplay, Love Song, directed by the one and only Julie Dash for MTV. She is a long time member of the Macondo Writers Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros, a contributing editor for Film Quarterly, and she has been a member of the Writers Guild since 1998.