One UK faculty member’s journey to recently being chosen for a prestigious national seminar basically began when she was born.

School of Journalism and Media assistant professor Kyra Hunting was born in Brooklyn, but spent her childhood in a much-like-Lexington “second city” in Michigan. With both parents in academia, she was constantly surrounded by books and healthy arguments, which she said taught her how to provide evidence to support a claim at a young age.

Hunting said she resisted academia in her undergraduate years in an effort to individualize herself from her parents. At Oberlin College, Hunting started with dreams to be an actress and a writer, but she soon discovered that she was more interested in the texts that were made than spending her time making them. She got her Bachelor of Arts in Cinema Studies with a plan to continue into advertising.

After securing a position at a startup company, she worked in the front office of a middle-man company for bottled products. She said her tasks included accounting and marketing, among others.

Her guilty pleasure was sneaking journals of popular culture into work to read during her down time, she said. Her father encouraged her to revisit her talent for academia by pointing out her free-time activities of reading media studies journals.

“I just felt like this was not really going to fulfill me, and I was more interested in my reading,” Hunting said.

But Hunting rethought graduate school and ended up at Michigan State to get her Master’s Degree in Media in an American Studies program, as well as a Media in Cultural Studies Program.

Not stopping there, Hunting made her way to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her Ph.D. Her doctorate is in Communication Arts with a Specialization in Media and Cultural Studies. Hunting’s areas of specialty include children’s media, genre and television.

Hunting feels as though every path, short of the sciences, leads back to media. She feels as though her major in college, Cinema Studies, was influential in what she ended up doing, even if it is not directly correlated. Being interested in acting helped shape her interest in film and television. To Hunting, there are many clear paths that can be drawn to Media Studies.

After spending time in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, Hunting decided it was time for a change of pace—and temperature—and came to Kentucky. The temperate weather wasn’t the only thing that attracted her to Lexington.

“I thought it had a very diverse student body and a lot of different opportunities to teach things that I really wanted to teach,” Hunting said.

After spending three years at UK, she has found the most rewarding part of her job to be teaching. Although the research aspect of her job is equally as important, especially at a research-based institution like UK, teaching is what she finds most personally fulfilling.

“I don’t want to minimize the role of research in teaching, because it… tends to feed back into teaching in a really productive way,” Hunting said.

Hunting’s most recent honor was being chosen for the Television Academy Foundation’s Faculty Seminar. According to the Foundation’s website, the Faculty Seminar “reaches into classrooms nationwide through 20 professors annually selected for immersion into week-long entertainment industry seminars.

The professors chosen had the opportunity to learn from the best of the television industry. The Fellows were exposed to a combination of site visits and panels in, what Hunting described as “a five-day television industry boot camp.” The goal is to give updated information to educators to give to students and help them take advantage of the opportunities in the television industry.

“It brings a lot of opportunity for those of us are situation in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Pennsylvania to come in proximity to the industry and find out about the opportunities to help our students come in proximity to the industry, which can be a little more challenging for a media student who isn’t in LA,” Hunting said.

Hunting said she has had many more experiences that have shaped her career. Although her experiences include everything from judging film festivals, learning from some of the most successful people in television and watching Dancing with the Stars from the audience, she finds that students are consistently one of the most interesting parts of her work.

“To a certain extent, even to this day, the first time that a student creates something that you would have neverconsidered they’d create, or the first time they make you cry in a good way, is in its own way an amazing experience,” Hunting said.

In her research, one of the most prevalent issues she’s come across is not within film, but film press. She expressed in detail how, time and time again, the press is perpetually re-surprised when female-oriented films do well. Her examples include “Clueless,” “Sex in the City,” “Twilight,” “The Hunger Games” and now even “Wonder Woman.”

“How do we continue to be surprised that movies about women do not fail?” Hunting said. “So that’s a thing that I think is kind of amazing that we keep thinking that we’re past it, but then it happens again.”

Hunting said she had the privilege of judging the Women and Minorities in Media Film Festival (WAMM), which she feels was a wonderful experience in which she got to see films and content that would not have made it to the masses otherwise.