Dr Dee Marco

Dr Derilene Marco is a creative scholar who holds a Senior Lecturer position in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at UCT. Dee received a PhD from Warwick University’s Film and Television Studies Department. 

Dee’s research pivots around social and cultural practices and experiences of the everyday, particularly in relation to person-hood, mothering identities, Black feminisms, practices and communions of care and critical joy finding in an exhausting world. She has written on apartheid and post-apartheid South African cinema, black women’s lives and stories as they are represented on the screen and is the co-editor of Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa's Twenty Six Years Since 1994 (2021) and Transforming Pedagogy, a workbook for parents (2023). Dee is the founder of the multimodal research project, Mother.Lab, which houses a mobile Complaints space for mothers and caregivers, called House of Complaints, among other forms of research. Dee is also author of Tiny Letters, a daily entry Substack on 40+ days post-partum which. Tiny Letters is also the catalyst for a data visualisation project by the same name and can be found here.

Dee has contributed to various academic journals, newspapers and podcasts, such as Are We Our Work? and Living While Feminist. She is also the co-host of the podcast (now slightly dated but still relevant), Mamas with Attitude.

Dee is interested in supervising students in a broad array of topics. Some include racial representations in visual culture and films that centralise Black narratives, popular culture that deals with mothers and forms of kinship and care, and different experiences of post-partum mothers as part of the ‘fragile’ middle class in post-apartheid South Africa. Among a broad range of topics, Dee is interested in supervising projects broadly related to affect and media/ film and race and gender in South African media.