Jacqueline Najuma Stewart

Stewart was born and raised in Hyde Park, within South Side, Chicago. During her childhood, she remembered her aunt Constance introducing her to classic films on television. She stated, "...I always stayed up really late with her watching black and white films. She would talk to me during the commercial breaks about all the stars and the theaters that she used to go to. I was fascinated by the alternative world that I saw, the way that people talked and the way they dressed."

She graduated from Kenwood Academy High School. Afterwards, she enrolled in Stanford University, intent on becoming a journalist. There, she watched Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986). Impressed, she studied Lee's career and feminist film theory, on which she based her Bachelor of Arts thesis. In 1991, she graduated with a Bachelors in English. After this, Stewart enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Chicago (UC). Stewart reflected, "Film studies was just being formalized there and they hired a scholar named Miriam Hansen who wound up being my dissertation advisor and my mentor. And she specialized in silent cinema." In 1993, she graduated with a Master's degree, and in 1998 with a PhD, both in English from the University of Chicago. Stewart taught at the University of Chicago from 1999 to 2006, serving in the Department of English and on the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies. In 2006, she joined the Department of Radio/Television/Film, and the Department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University as an associate professor. She returned to the University of Chicago in 2013 as a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. During the fall of 2020, she began an extended leave from the University of Chicago after she was selected as the first artistic director for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. She returned to the university in 2024 after also serving as the museum's president.

In 2018, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2024, she was awarded the Distinguished Career Achievement Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.