Chi-Tsung is a PhD student in Film & Media Studies and English at the University of Pittsburgh. He has a professional background in software engineering and video production, and his research interests include racial and gender representation in media, production studies, political economy, and media history. Chi-Tsung received his MFA in Film & Television Studies from Boston University with his …
Romas Zabarauskas established himself as a provocative Baltic storyteller with a politically engaging and visually lush body of work. Zabarauskas holds a BA in film (2009-2012) from Saint-Denis University (Paris) with an exchange year at Hunter College (New York), and an MA in communication (2014-2016) from KSU (Vilnius). Romas is based in Vilnius with his fiancé Kornelijus. Zabarauskas’ previous feature …
Jan Levchenko, PhD (University of Tartu, Estonia) is a former professor at Higher School of Economics, Moscow (2009-2021) specialized in visual studies, film analysis and history of ideas. Since 2021 he’s been an editor-in-chief of the Kinoteksty book series at the New Literary Observer publishing house. He’s also a journalist in the Postimees Publishing Group, Tallinn, Estonia, and a professor of Briva …
Elizaveta Volkovskaia is a Ph.D. student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures program. She received a B.A. in Linguistics and Translation in Saint Petersburg and an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Arizona. Her current research interests include social media and participatory culture in the context of the Russian invasion of …
Sam Bodamer is a PhD student in the joint Slavic and Film and Media Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include Soviet national cinemas of the Thaw-era, Soviet and independent cinema of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, The Riga School of Poetic Documentary, 20th century art cinema, and modernism in film. She …
Oleksandra Matviichuk heads Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize along with Memorial, the largest human rights organization in Russia, and Ales Bialiatski, a democracy and human rights advocate in Belarus. Founded in 2007 to strengthen civil society and democracy in Ukraine, the CCL has this year focused on investigating and documenting war …
Roman Dorofeev has been active in festival programming and film and media studies for two decades, working as distributor of independent distribution company that acquires rights for ex-USSR territories.
Igor Soukmanov (Belarus)is a film expert, publicist, festival organizer and journalist member of the European Film Academy, founding member of the newly established Belarusian Independent Film Academy. He is a permanent writer of a film magazine Iskusstvo Kino (Film Art), one of the earliest European journals that specializes in film studies. He graduated in film history from Moscow’s renowned Russian …
Daniel Witkin is a PhD student in the joint Slavic and Film and Media Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh, where his research interests include Soviet and post-Soviet media and cinema, surrealism, formalism, and theories of montage. He received his BA in Russian and Eastern European Studies and Film Studies from Wesleyan University and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. His writings on cinema and some other things have also been published in Reverse Shot, Film Comment, and Cinema Scope, among others.
Jacob Richey is a graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literature. He received his B.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. His research interests include Siberian punk music, Stalinist culture, and the development of nationalism in former socialist states.
