Russian Film Symposium 2003
Participants

Lucy Fischer is the author of 6 books: Jacques Tati (1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (1989), Imitation of Life (1991), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (1996), Sunrise (1998), and Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (forthcoming). She has published extensively on issues of film history, theory and criticism in such journals as Screen, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, Biography, Film Quarterly, etc. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and has written catalog essays for exhibits at the Wight Gallery (Los Angeles) and the Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY). She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts "Art Critics Fellowship," as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. She is currently the President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and has served as the organization's Vice-President and President-Elect. She has also served as chair of the Film Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association.

Mr. Judson was, until recently, curator of film and video at Carnegie Museum of Art, where he conceived and presented a wide range of international and historic film series throughout the year. He also organized ongoing video installation exhibitions and related performances and events.

Mr. Judson teaches courses related to the history and theory of film and video art in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. He majored in art history at Williams College, where he received his B.A. in 1960. He received his M.A. at Oberlin College in 1968, and while at Yale University he held a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to France for film research.

Vance Kepley, Jr is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is the author of "In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko" (Madison, WI, 1986) and a number of articles on Russian and Soviet cinema.

Alexander Prokhorov teaches Russian literature and film at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the College of William and Mary. He is an author of several articles on Russian film and literary history.

Elena Prokhorova teaches Russian film, media, and literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, College of William and Mary. She has recently defended her dissertation on Brezhnev-era TV mini-series. Elena is the author of a number of articles on Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture.

Aleksandr Shpagin graduated from Film Criticism Department of the State Institute for Filmmaking in 1993. Since 1996 he has been the programming director of the Russian cinema section of REN-TV, where he produced the series "The Premiere That Never Happened" (1996-1998), which resurrected a number of very important but virtually unknown films made during the Thaw and Stagnation.

Natal'ia Sirivlia graduated from the Theatre Criticism Department of GITIS, the major theatrical training institute in Russia in 1983. Since 1989 she has been on the editorial board of Iskusstvo kino, the major Russian film journal, though she publishes in a range of other journals and newspapers (occasionally using the pseudonym "N. Leibman").

Elena Stishova has established herself as one of the most important Russian researchers in the areas of feminist film studies and continues to work on a wide range of issues in cinema. She is the author of the books The Near Past (1989) and Look Who's Here! (1989). Her articles have appeared in major film journals both in Russia and abroad, and she has been an invited speaker at numerous international symposia and conferences.

Oleg Sul'kin is a graduate of the Moscow State University (1974), where he majored in art history and theory. He worked for the Novosti Press Agency and Sovetskii Ekran magazine as a reporter and film critic. He was editor-in-chief of Soviet Film magazine. He has written several books, brochures, and hundreds of articles about film, theatre and visual arts. Since 1995, when he moved with his family to the USA, he works as a staff writer for Novoye Russkoye Slovo, a Russian daily newspaper based in New York. Since 1999 – a host of the weekly FilmHour program on the People's Wave Russian-American radio station in New York.

Nancy Condee's undergraduate and graduate work was done at Columbia, Brown, and Yale Universities, with research semesters at Leningrad State University, Moscow State University, and the Gor'kii Institute of World Literature. She has worked as a consultant for US and British cultural exchanges, festivals, and projects, including the Edinburgh Festival (UK), Public Broadcasting Service (Frontline), the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Film Festival, National Film Theatre (UK), and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Together with Vladimir Padunov, she directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture (1990-93), supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

Her work has appeared in scholarly and popular publications in the US (The Nation, Washington Post October), Russia (Iskusstvo kino, Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Rodnik), and the UK (New Formations, Framework. New Left Review). Her research area is contemporary (post-1964) Russian culture, with an emphasis on film, literature, and popular culture (Russian tattoos, the women's public baths, mumiyo).

Recent Publications

• "Uncles, Deviance, and Ritual Combat: The Cultural Codes of Khrushchev's Thaw." The Khrushchev Era: A Reappraisal. Ed. Abbott Gleason and William Taubman. New Haven: Yale UP, in press.
• Endquote: Literary Sots-Art and Soviet Grand Style (Northwestern UP, 2000) with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko
• "The Dream of Well-Being." Article on contemporary Russian film industry. Sight and Sound (UK) 7.12 (December 1997): 18-21.
• Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia. Nancy Condee, ed. Bloomington/London: Indiana UP and British Film Institute, 1995.
• "The Relentless Cult of Novelty, or How to Wreck the Century: Rethinking Soviet Studies." Beyond Soviet Studies. Ed. Daniel Orlovsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 285-304.

Seth Graham is currently writing his PhD dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh on the Soviet anekdot, with special emphasis on that genre's discursive links with other forms of Soviet popular culture, especially film. His research interests include contemporary Russian cinema and early Soviet film comedy.

Gerald McCausland holds degrees from Middlebury College (BA, Political Science; MA Russian) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (MA, German). His research interests include contemporary Russian culture and critical theory, with particular emphasis on post-Soviet subjectivity and its role in the formation of national identities. His publications include articles on Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Andrei Platonov, and he is currently working toward completion of his PhD dissertation: The Post-Soviet Condition: Cultural Reconfigurations of Russian National Identity, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Padunov received his B.A. from Brooklyn College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Hunter College, as well as in Germany and Russia.

Together with Nancy Condee, he directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture (1990-93), supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. His work has been published in the US (The Nation, October, WideAngle), the UK (Framework, New Left Review, New Formations), and Russia (Voprosy literatury, Znamia, Iskusstvo kino). His areas of research include Russian visual culture, narrative history and theory, film history.

Recent publications

• "Views of the Present As Visions of the Past," Iskusstvo kino 10, 1996;
• "'Large Loose Baggy Monsters': The Poetics of Excess in Contemporary Russian Culture" in Russian Literature of the XX Century: Directions and Tendencies (Ekaterinburg: Ural State Pedagogical University, 1996);
• "History and Identity in Recent Russian Cinema" in Beyond Perestroika: Jews and History in the Global Village (NY: The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 1995).
• Dostoevsky's "The Demons" and the Form of Tendentious Narration (1995).
• "Makulakul'tura," with Nancy Condee, Russian Culture in Transition (Stanford Slavic Studies, 1993)
• "Perestroika Suicide: Not by bred Alone," with Nancy Condee (Russian Culture in Transition, Stanford Slavic Studies, 1993)

Daniel H. Wild is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh where he is completing his dissertation The Writing on the Screen: Images of Text in the German Cinema from the 1920s to 1950s. He has taught film courses at the University of Pittsburgh and at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. He has been published in Ellen Bishop (ed.), Cinema-(to)-Graphy: Film and Writing in Contemporary Composition Courses (Heinemann 1999) and in various art publications in collaboration with the Dresden multi-media group Bewegung Nurr. In 2000 he served as the curator for the European Cinema Film Series at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Zolotukhina is pursuing a B.S. in Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She graduated from the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Rockville, Maryland, in 2001. Member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. Upcoming member of the Golden Key International Honour Society.