Dr. Aymar Jean "AJ" Escoffery (fka Aymar Jean Christian) is the Margaret Walker Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and Faculty Director of the MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises.
He is the author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), and The Cookout: A Guide to AI: Ancestral Intelligence(For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025). He is the co-author of Media Reparations (Polity, forthcoming) and Beyond the Screen: A Decade of Unfiltered Storytelling(For the Birds Trapped in Airports, 2025), which chronicles 10 years of his OTV project. Dr. Escoffery co-founded OTV | Open Television, a platform for intersectional television. OTV programs have received recognition from the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), Webby Awards, Streamy Awards, Gotham Awards, among others. Dr. Escoffery founded The Invite, a living film project, podcast, and invite-only platform for storytellers and community organizers.
Dr. Escoffery engages industry and community as part of his research. He regularly serves as executive producer of films and series, including Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines(Special Jury Award, 2024 Sundance Film Festival), Sarah Oberholtzer’s We Call Each Other, and The Invite with Emmy Award winning producer Makiah Green and Emmy-nominated director Sam Bailey. He has given lectures for and collaborated with the Sundance Institute, Vimeo, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Black Public Media, and more. He has juried television and video for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. His work has been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation & Field Foundation (Leaders for a New Chicago, 2019), Variety(Top 50 Entertainment Instructor 2020 & 2021), Filmmaker(25 New Faces of Indie Film, 2018) NewCity (Film Leader 2017 & Film Hall of Fame 2020), Chicago magazine (New Power List, 2021) and Seed&Spark (Filmmaker to Watch 2018).
