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 explores the films and career of Soviet documentary filmmaker Esfir Shub from 1927 to 1937. Anastasia’s broader academic interests include documentary film history and theory with particular focus on questions of ideology, credibility and representation; transgressions between documentary and fiction; women’s film history, early Soviet and post-Soviet documentary film.
Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina--Wilmington, where she teaches courses on Russian and Eastern European cinema as well as global documentary. Her first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes--and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also the co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature from Yale University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.