Oleksandra Matviichuk

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

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

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

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

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.

Emma Schwarz

Emma Schwarz is a Ph.D. student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures program. She received a B.A. with Honors in Computer Science/Russian Language & Literature from the New College of Florida and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include digital humanities, computational philology, and the early Russian novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

Dasha Prokhorova

Dasha Prokhorova is a Ph.D. student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Slavic Languages and Literatures program. She received a B.A. in Anthropology and Russian Language and Literature from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from New York University in Media, Culture and Communication. Her current research interests include late and post-Soviet culture, émigré literature, cultural memory, diaspora studies and Soviet-Latin American relations.

Ekaterine Kotrikadze

Ekaterine Kotrikadze is a Russian and Georgian journalist, tv-presenter and media manager. She is news director at Dozhd TV channel (TV Rain), former editor-in-chief of the RTVI TV network, and Georgian TV channel PIK.

Mikhail Itkin

Mikhail Itkin is an incoming PhD student in the interdisciplinary Film Studies and Slavic program at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests include late-Soviet and postmodernist literature and visual culture, narratology, and social philosophy. He published works on Vladimir Korolenko, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, David Samoilov, and made presentations on international conferences. He is also the editor and regular contributor to the journal K! Film Criticism and Theory, based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko

Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko is a filmmaker, writer, and musician. His oeuvre includes several hundred films, music videos, and advertising. He authored a dozen books of poetry; in Ukrainian, they are collected in a volume Decadence (2017), in English Happy Lovers (2021). He was the first to have translated Jim Morrison’s poetry into Ukrainian and published it in 2013. he has also translated English poetry of the Restoration Period, including the works of John Rochester. His music discography consists of more than 50 albums. He had a few personal photo exhibitions (Ukraine, and Georgia). His paintings, drawings, and sculptures are in private collections (Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Germany, Canada, USA). For the first year of the war when Russia invaded Ukraine, he stayed in Ukraine, got involved in a volunteer movement, and worked with foreign journalists as a producer, filmmaker, and journalist to spread the truth about the situation, the context, and the historical background.