Hugo Ljungbäck holds a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His videos have screened at festivals, galleries, and museums internationally and are distributed worldwide by Vtape and Light Cone.
He is currently developing a dissertation project on mid-century queer home movies and amateur films, an almost wholly overlooked chapter of the history of queer cinema. The first part of this project, an essay on François Reichenbach’s amateur filmmaking activities throughout the early 1950s, won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Queer and Trans Caucus Chris Holmlund Prize and is forthcoming in New Review of Film and Television Studies. Other essays, related to his broader interests in found footage filmmaking, media preservation, surveillance, and critical video practices, have appeared in The Archivability of Television, Found Footage Magazine, Cinéma & Cie, and Media, War & Conflict. His research has been generously supported by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Carolina Public Humanities, the UNC Center for European Studies, the UChicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, among others.
He has served as co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee since 2020 and board member and co-secretary of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema since 2023. At the University of Chicago, he has also coordinated the Mass Culture and Digital Media Workshops.