[5][6] Stewart is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Film Preservation Board, and was honored as a MacArthur Fellow.
Meanwhile, Stewart served as the chairwoman for the nonprofit arts organization, Black Cinema House,[7] and founded the South Side Home Movie Project.
In 2015, Stewart collaborated with Charles Musser on curating the DVD set Pioneers of African-American Cinema, which led to an appearance on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), alongside Ben Mankiewicz.
She subsequently appeared at the TCM Classic Film Festival, and in 2019, Stewart was hired to host the Silent Sunday Nights programming block on late-night weekends.
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.
The Chicago Tribune reported she had spent a decade researching the topic, which focused on the role Hollywood cinema played in both influencing and reflecting the social mobility of Black Americans, particularly during the Great Migration when they began relocating to the Northeast after living in the South.
[2] During the 1990s, Austen began researching a WCIU-TV children's dance program titled Kiddie a-Go-Go, which was replaced by Soul Train, after he had been sent photographs for a story.
[28] During the summer of 2017, Stewart was invited on Turner Classic Movies to present a selection of films from the set, with future colleague Ben Mankiewicz.
[31] In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, writer–director John Ridley wrote an op-ed calling for the 1939 film Gone with the Wind to be pulled from HBO Max.
But it is precisely because of the ongoing, painful patterns of racial injustice and disregard for Black lives that Gone with the Wind should stay in circulation and remain available for viewing, analysis and discussion.
"[34] In 2021, TCM debuted a new series titled Reframed Classics, reanalyzing 18 films with problematic racial and gender stereotypes, with Stewart as one of the hosts.
[35] Charles Tabesh, TCM's senior vice president of programming, told the Los Angeles Times the response to the Reframed Classics series was mixed among older audiences.
She said: "They appreciate the channel and the ways it is recognizing issues like blackface in classic films, or the casting of white actors to play nonwhite characters, in greater depth.