Erin Alpert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her BA in Russian Studies from the College of William and Mary and MA from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include documentary cinema, GULAG studies and Holocaust studies and she is currently writing her dissertation on Perestroika …

Olga Mukhortova is a PhD student at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, where she recently earned her MA degree. Olga received her first Specialist degree in Slavic Philology from the Samara Academy for the Humanities in Samara, Russia and the second Specialist degree in European Culture Studies from the Russian State University for …

A media historian, Mark Lynn Anderson is interested in deviance as it relates to the communications industries of the early twentieth century, particularly the cinema. His research considers how non-normative ways of being in the world have been engaged with and negotiated by emergent media institutions and by the forces of media regulation and control. Anderson has published several book …

Ellina Sattarova is enrolled in a joint Film/Slavic Studies PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her BA in Linguistics and Teaching Methodology from the Moscow State Linguistic University and her MA in German Literature and Film from the University of Montana. Among her research interests are contemporary Russian cinema, fairy tale motifs in film, and their role in …

Jeremy Hicks is a Reader (ie Associate Professor) in Russian Culture and Film at Queen Mary University of London (UK). He is the author of Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz (Nottingham, 2000), Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London and New York, 2007) and First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938-46 (Pittsburgh, 2012), which won the Wayne C. …

Philip Cavendish is a Senior Lecturer in Russian Literature and Film Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.  His particular interests lie in the poetics of visual style, the creative role of the camera operator, the relationship between technology and aesthetics, and the phenomenon of the “photo-film” in Russian and Soviet cinema.  He is …

Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include film sound, star studies, South Asian early cinema, and documentary film. She is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s. Her research tracks the transmutations that occur in such seemingly …

Programmer/selector since 1997 for the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), a 25 day film festival of over 400 films, which includes features, documentaries, archival films, animation, experimental and short films. Ajaja is a writer and a poet and specializes in films from Eastern/Central Europe, Russia, Baltics and Central Asia. Born in Hollywood, she has lived in Moscow and Saint Petersburg …