Dr. Brecken Hunter Wellborn (he/him) is a media studies educator, film and television critic, and serial Mean Girls-quoter located in Dallas, Texas.

 

Currently, he is Film Studies lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his PhD in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2026. His research focuses on the intersection of genre and queerness in Hollywood cinema. He teaches undergraduate media studies courses, including core film studies courses, such as Understanding Film and Transnational Film/Video, as well as Film Authorship: Queer(ed) US Cinema, an upper-division course he developed that provides students with the tools to reconsider what defines a “queer film.”

 

His academic research appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, Fandom from Bloomsbury Academic, and New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstreamification from Intellect.

 

His popular criticism and commentary appears on Collider.com, with interpretive takes on film and television from a queer lens.​