She is currently a 2016-2017 Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities where she is completing her manuscript Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory in Sports Cinema. She earned her MA and PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California Los Angeles. Sheppard is the co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016). She has published essays in Cinema Journal and the award-winning edited collection The L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015). She has forthcoming essays in the Journal of Sport & Social Issues and the Journal of Sports History.