Olga Klimova, Ph.D., is a Lecturer and a Director of the Russian Program in The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches Russian language, literature, and culture courses.  Her articles, encyclopedia entries, and film reviews have appeared in The Soviet and Post–Soviet Review, Kinokultura, SEEJ, and other academic publications.  Her academic interests include visual and popular culture …

Maxime Bey-Rozet is an instructor in the department of French and Italian and the Film Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies in 2020. His dissertation, Irredeemable: Céline, Extreme Cinemas, and the Opacity of Trauma identifies and evaluates the legacy of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline in 21st century so-called ‘extreme cinemas.’ His research has …

Dinara Garifullina is a PhD student in film and media studies program with a concentration in Slavic languages and literatures in the University of Pittsburgh. Building on her background in art history, she is currently focusing on post-Soviet cinema and its relationship to queerness as well as on women’s filmmaking in Russia and Vasilii Rozanov.

Bella Grigoryan is Associate Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her PhD from Columbia University. She studies 18th- and 19th-century Russian literature.

Daria Shembel earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Studies and Film from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Since 2005 she has been teaching Russian, European Studies, New Media, and Film at San Diego State University. Her primary academic interests lie in Soviet and European film theories and histories, new media/old media historiography, Russian Modernism with an emphasis on poetry …

Felix Helbing is a PhD student in Slavic Literature at the University of Pittsburgh with a background in digital advertising and video game localization. His research investigates the intersection of technology and the human body during two vastly different historical periods: early Soviet Russia and the contemporary United States. Felix is currently writing a dissertation on the philosophies of Aleksandr …

Stasia Grankovskaia is an actress, director, and cinematographer. Her 2019 debut documentary How Dina and Me Went to Chelny was nominated in the category “Best auteur film” for the national documentary award Laurel Bough.

Anastasia Kostina is a PhD candidate in the joint program in Film and Media Studies & Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation research focuses on the career of Soviet documentary pioneer Esfir Shub. Anastasia’s broader academic interests include documentary history and theory, Soviet and post-Soviet documentary, transgressions between documentary and fiction, history of women’s cinema, environmental film. In …

Tat’iana Stefanenko was born in Novosibirsk in 1982 and trained as a philologist. She then worked as a librarian, correspondent, and editor. She pursued her passion for documentaries while studying at the School of Documentary Films of Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov. Her works were shown in Russian and international festivals (e.g., Moscow International Documentary Film Festival DOKer and Les Saisons …

Robert Clift, Ph.D. is a documentary filmmaker and media studies scholar with work appearing on national public television, in film festivals, on new media platforms and in academic publications. His most recent film, Making Montgomery Clift (2018), looks at the life and legacy of his uncle, classic Hollywood movie star and queer icon Montgomery Clift. Produced and directed with Hillary Demmon, …