Biography
Tijah Bumgarner (b. 1983, West Virginia, USA) is a filmmaker and professor. She teaches narrative and documentary video production at Marshall University. Bumgarner holds a BFA in film/video from the California Institute of the Arts and an MA in Media Studies from West Virginia State University. As a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, her dissertation “Examining the Ground: Shifting Narratives in Post-Coal Appalachia,” explores how extraction is narrativized. Bumgarner’s experience growing up in West Virginia has inspired much of her work. In 2017, Bumgarner completed her first feature film, Meadow Bridge, a coming-of-age narrative set in rural West Virginia. Currently, she is working on a short documentary about the opioid epidemic in Appalachia. In both scholarship and practice, Bumgarner seeks to disrupt stereotypes that conform to a single defining narrative of the region.