Ilya Budraitskis

llya Budraitskis is a political and social theorist, previously based in Moscow. He recently joined UC, Berkeley as a visiting scholar. He writes regularly for Jacobin, Republic.ru, Colta.ru, Posle.media and other outlets. Budraitskis’s essay collection, Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia, was published by Verso in 2022.

Marina Belenky

Marina Belenky is a theatre art historian and culturologist. She has a long record of running international art projects, including as the Director of Stanislavsky Summer School, affiliated with Harvard University, for 25 years, as well as “Theater Land” in Riga, Latvia and “Acting Playing” in Valencia, Spain. She has produced numerous workshops in Boston, Moscow, New York, Montreal, Valencia, Barcelona and London and developed various international educational ventures.

Anatoli Ulyanov

Anatoli Ulyanov (b.1984) is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian writer born in the Soviet Union and based in Los Angeles. He is best known as an editor for some of Ukraine’s most controversial media outlets, including Proza, Looo.ch, Sho, and DADAKINDER, where he writes about culture and politics. His unconventional opinions on identity, class, sexuality, and history have made him a target of criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.

Sasha Phillips

Sasha Phillips serves as Counsel in Dentons Cohen & Grigsby’s Corporate Practice Group. Sasha’s international background and unyielding commitment to excellence allow her to serve her clients in a wide range of domestic and foreign matters. Sasha regularly works with clients in the manufacturing, robotics, health care, construction, energy, art, and financial services industries. She assists them in a wide range of cases including sanctions compliance, import and export control, DOJ investigations, consumer protection, shareholder actions, data security, contractual disputes, fraud, FCPA, IP, cross-border disputes, and international trade.

Nataliya Masharova

Natasha Masharova (b. 1984) is a Ukrainian-born and Los Angeles-based visual artist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker. She was a co-founder and visual editor of several influential art and culture media outlets covering the post-Soviet area (Looo.ch, Proza.com.ua, Sho), and worked as a photographer for various international magazines (Vice, TimeOut, Esquire, etc).

Mark Lipovetsky

Born and educated in the USSR, Mark Lipovetsky has lived in the U.S. since 1996. His research interests include such subjects as post-Soviet culture, Russian post-modernism, post-Soviet drama, late Soviet nonconformist culture, and tricksters in Soviet culture. Lipovetsky edited 5-volumes of Dmitry Prigov’s collected works and currently is working on his critical biography. Lipovetsky’s works were nominated for the Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and short-listed for the Andrey Bely Prize (2008). In 2014, Lipovetsky received an award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for the outstanding contribution to scholarship. In 2019, Lipovetsky was awarded the Andrei Belyi Prize for his service to Russian literature. A History of Russian Literature (Oxford, 2018), which Lipovetsky co-authored, received the Honorable Mention from the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Volodymyr Ishchenko

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on protests and social movements, revolutions, radicalisation, right and left politics, nationalism, and civil society. He has published widely on contemporary Ukrainian politics, the Euromaidan revolution, and the ensuing war. He has been a prominent contributor to The Guardian, Al Jazeera, …

Tikhon Dzyadko

Tikhon Dzyadko is a Russian journalist, television presenter and media manager. He is the editor-in-chief of the Dozhd TV channel, former deputy editor-in-chief and host of the RTVI TV network. He previously worked at the radio station Echo of Moscow and the Ukrainian channel Inter.

Alexander Prokhorov

Alexander Prokhorov teaches Russian and Film at the College of William & Mary. He is co-editor of Cinemasaurus: Russian Film in Contemporary Context (with Nancy Condee and Elena Prokhorova, 2020) and co-author of Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era (with Elena Prokhorova, 2017). His articles and reviews have been published in Journal of Film and Video, KinoKultura, …