Keith Davis, MFA
Instructional Assistant Professor of THeatre & FIlm
Keith L. Davis is an actor, filmmaker, and educator with over two decades of experience in the United States and Europe. He earned his B.A. in Theatre (1997) from the University of Alabama, his M.F.A. in Acting (2000) from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, and his M.F.A. in Film Production (2008) from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he was a Dean's Fellowship recipient. In 2024, he joined the University of Mississippi as an Instructional Assistant Professor of Film Production in the Department of Theatre & Film.
As an editor, Davis has worked on feature films and broadcast series, including Insecure: The End (HBO), Between the World and Me (HBO), Druid Peak, The Director: An Evolution in Three Acts, and Maladies. He has produced and edited content for World Wrestling Entertainment, Vice Media, Netflix, Gucci, UNICEF, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, and Firelight Media. His acting work includes Broadway productions of Julius Caesar and Festen, regional work at Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Yale Repertory Theatre, and television appearances on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and Third Watch.
Davis's debut narrative feature, The American People, is supported by the Sundance Feature Film Program, where he was a Screenwriting Fellow and a Directing Fellow, receiving the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship and the Honda Power of Dreams Fellowship for directing. He was also selected for the Berlinale Talent Campus at the Berlin International Film Festival. His short film work has screened at festivals including Palm Springs International Short Fest, Urbanworld, BronzeLens, Chicago International, San Francisco Black Film Festival, and Oxford Film Festival. Before joining the University of Mississippi, he taught at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College, New York University, and the New York Film Academy.
His current creative and scholarly project, Laurel, MS (working title), is a feature-length documentary examining paternal absence, masculinity, and intergenerational family dynamics. The film is rooted in Davis's own family history connected to Laurel, Mississippi, and traces the life of his father, a Vietnam veteran whose post-war struggles shaped a long arc of family separation. Drawing on autoethnography, oral history, and community-engaged methods, the project uses a contrapuntal structure that weaves personal narrative, classroom sequences, interviews, and archival material. Positioned as practice-based research within gender studies, the film moves away from individual blame toward structural analysis, asking how military service, trauma, incarceration, economic precarity, and the codes of American manhood shape the families men leave behind. Through Mississippi as both setting and case study, the work examines how patterns of masculinity are transmitted, ruptured, and remade across generations.
Gender Studies -Related Research Interests: masculinity in narrative and documentary cinema, representations of Black manhood in American television and film, performance and embodiment of gender on stage and screen, the role of editing in shaping gendered storytelling, and the construction of masculine identity in coming-of-age narratives.
