Personal Statement
Yannis Tzioumakis joined the University of Liverpool in 2007 as a Lecturer in Communication and Media after working for seven year at Liverpool John Moores University.


He did his PhD at Sheffield Hallam University under the supervision of Professors Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, with his dissertation focusing on the cinema of David Mamet and the ways in which he maintained independence while working for Hollywood studios and their subsidiaries.


Before that Yannis had completed his MA in Contemporary Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University with Distinction, while for his undergraduate degree he studied English Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.


Yannis has published prolifically in the areas of film studies and media industry studies and has been instrumental in making them areas of research and teaching specialisation in the Department of Communication and Media.


He has been heading the Department’s Screen and Film Studies Research Cluster since 2019, while as of 2023 he has been co-director of the Centre for Converged Screen Media and Entertainment (COSME).


Yannis has also helped develop teaching programmes that speak to these fields of specialisation, including a BA Screen Industries and Entertainment and an MA Screen Studies.


Over the course of his time at Liverpool, Yannis has taken on a number of administrative roles at Department and School level, including as School of the Arts Director of PGR for the four year period 2017-21. Currently, besides serving as co-director of COSME, Yannis is also the director of the MA Screen Studies.

Research Overview
Yannis's research focuses on six main areas:

• American independent cinema
• Hollywood studios and global entertainment
• The Greek screen industries
• Cinema and youth cultures
• The B film as a platform for creative filmmaking
• Screen industries and Sport

His publications include 6 monographs, all focusing on aspects of American independent film, with his book American Independent Cinema (2006; second edition 2017) having been a key work in the field. They also include 7 collections, the focus of which ranges from Greek cinema to American independent cinema; from the relationship between cinema and politics to new understandings of the Hollywood Renaissance; from the film Dirty Dancing and its impact on popular culture to the history of Hollywood major United Artists to the ways in which concepts of media independence are now associated with discourses surrounding television.

These books have been published with leading publishers, including: Routledge, Edinburgh University Press, Wayne State University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, University of Chicago Press and Palgrave.

Yannis' work has also appeared in a number of key journals, including: Media Industries, Screen, Velvet Light Trap, Film History, Studies in Documentary Film, New Review of Film and Television StudiesInternational Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and Revue Francais D'Etudes Americaines.

His work has also appeared in numerous edited collections focusing on the work of filmmakers such as John Sayles, David Mamet, Steven Soderbergh, Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Jacques Tourneur, Spike Jonze, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, companies such as Orion Pictures and USA Films, and on topics ranging from Hollywood and media convergence to the ways in which independent film travels outside the US; from how Greek Americans are represented in US film to how Hollywood productions shot on location in Greece have impacted the Greek film industry.

Yannis has also been co-editor of 4 book series:American Indies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009-12) has published 5 volumes on key US independent films, such as Lost in Translation and Memento. Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge, 2017-) has published 30 volumes on well-known youth films such as Clueless, Grease, Boyhood, The Virgin Suicides, The Hunger Games. Routledge Hollywood CentenaryTHE ROUTLEDGE (Routledge, 2018-) has published 3 volumes on MGM, Fox and United Artists.International Screen Industries (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2024-) Yannis has taken on this role after the founding editors of the series stepped down

Yannis is on the advisory boards of Media Industries and Transnational Screens. Between 2014 and 2020 he was on the editorial board of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and between 2002 and 2017 he was on the advisory board of the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Since 2020 he has also been on the editorial board of Liverpool University Press.

He has organised and hosted numerous conferences and symposia, while for a 10 year period (2010-2019) he was co-organiser and co-host of the Liverpool Film Seminar, which hosted over 80 leading scholar disseminating research in the field of film studies.

Yannis’s current projects include the monograph, WHEN HOLLYWOOD CAME TO GREECE, 1957-1967 (Routledge, 2025) and the co-authored PARAMOUNT (Routledge, 2026).

Yannis can offer PhD supervision on all areas of his research interests, especially American independent cinema, contemporary Hollywood and entertainment industry studies, the Greek screen industries and screen industries and sport. He is currently supervises PhDs on American independent cinema and the AIDS focused films of the 1980s, and on US cable channel HBO and its film programming in the 1980s and 1990s.