James B. Joyce received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a second major in Communication Arts from Allegheny College in 1997.  In 2004 Jim finished his Master of Fine Arts thesis in fulfillment of Radio/TV/Film’s requirements at Northwestern University.  The twenty-two minute short, First and Last, follows a social worker who deals with other people’s families as his own drifts apart.

An Assistant Professor at Cleveland State University's Film & Media Arts school, Jim moved from Montana to Ohio in 2022. He has taught a wide range of of film production courses, from ideation to thesis production to writing for video games.

Having received the Mary Edsel McLaughlin Creativity grant in 2017, Jim travelled to Gradsko, Macedonia to research his current feature-length screenplay, The Straight & Narrow.  The film follows a displaced Native American (Lilia) who dispenses advices from her titular pub house; she figuratively adopts a ten-year-old (Luke) who panhandles at his mother’s hospital so he can fly to Japan’s Fukedome reactor and be bit by a radioactive spider—Luke wants to save his Mom from her cancer while Lilia wants to prepare him for his inevitable loss.