Olga Mukhortova is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic and Film at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. Olga holds her MA degree from the University of Pittsburgh (2013). She received her first specialist degree in Slavic Philology from the Samara Academy for the Humanities in Samara, Russia and the second specialist degree in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Russia. Olga’s research interests include contemporary Russian cinema, star and celebrity studies, empire, and post-colonialism. Her dissertation focuses on the Russian star system (post-1991), in particular, on the figure of a director-star. Olga serves as a Lecturer of Russian at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa since 2017.