A graduate of the University of Virginia, where she earned her BA in Anthropology and Afro-American and African Studies, Gillam received her PhD from Cornell University. Her academic contributions include the monograph Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press, 2022). She is currently advancing her second major project, Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism in Brazil, which is under contract with Columbia University Press.

In addition to her book projects, Gillam’s research has been widely disseminated in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, and Feminist Media Studies. Through both her teaching and her field-based research, she continues to map the evolving landscape of Black representation and resistance in the Americas.