Elena Prokhorova teaches Russian and Film and Media Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research focuses on identity discourses in late Soviet and post-Soviet media. She is co-editor (with Nancy Condee and Alexander Prokhorov) of Cinemasaurus: Russian Film in Contemporary Context (2020) and co-author (with Alexander Prokhorov) of the Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet …
Laura Pontieri (Ph.D. Yale University) is a researcher on Russian cinema and European animation. She taught Soviet cinema and animation at the University of Toronto for many years, and she is currently working on a monograph on the renown Russian director Fedor Khitruk. She is the author of the book Soviet Animation and The Thaw of the 1960s. Not Only for Children (2012), as well as …
Eva Ivanilova is a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures Program. She works at the intersections of Russian intellectual history, semiotics, film theory, and political philosophy. Her publications on cinema and literature have appeared in KinoKultura, Iskusstvo kino, Tolstoy Studies Journal, several anthologies, and popular websites.
Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her research interests include film sound, star studies, South Asian early cinema, and documentary film. She is co-editor of …
Kostas Marsaan is a native Sakha film director. He studied history and political science at Yakutsk State University, and theater direction at the Moscow workshop of Alla Surikova and Vladimir Fokin. Since 2010, he has worked as a director, film editor, screenwriter at Art Doydu Production Company, for which he directed his debut, the mystery thriller My Killer. In 2016, the film entered the …
Marianna Siegen is a native Sakha female film producer. She started her career as an organizer of various public events—from national festivals and political campaigns to theatrical musicals. In 2010, she produced her first film (Leaving Hong-Kong) and a year after, founded Art Doydu Production Company. As a CEO of the company, Marianna has leaded projects that brought her more than …
Stanislav Sokolov is a Russian stop-motion animation director, an artist, and a screenwriter. He has graduated from The Gerasimov All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1971, where he was studying under the prominent director, Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Since then, he has worked at different film studios, such as Soyuzmultfilm, DEFA, Christmasfilms, and S4C. He is currently teaching at VGIK, where he also chairs the …
Michele Leigh is an independent scholar who writes about gender in film and television, as well as Russian cinema and animation. A 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar in Russia, Leigh conducted research for a manuscript on female industrial labor in the film industry prior to 1917. She has published articles on historiography, early Russian cinema, and films of the Thaw. Along with …
Lora Mjolsness is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine and the Director of Program in Russian Studies. She teaches interdisciplinary courses on Russian and Soviet Cinema and on the History of Soviet Animation. Lora and Michele Leigh recently published the book entitled “She Animates: Soviet Female Subjectivity in Russian Animation” with Academic Studies Press.
Olga Blackledge is an Assistant Professor of Communications at Bethany College in West Virginia. Her research focuses on aesthetics, politics, and technology of media in general, and animation in particular. She has published articles and reviews in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Film Quarterly, and KinoKultura. Currently, she is working on her book manuscript on Soviet and German animation of the 1930-1940.
