Marina Hassapopoulou

Marina Hassapopoulou is Associate Professor and Co-Associate Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some of her areas of expertise include: interactive cinema, digital humanities, creative artificial intelligence and AI ethics, media archaeology, transnational and border cinemas, posthumanism, science fiction, reception and fan studies, film and media theory/philosophy, and hybrid pedagogy. Her book, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press - Electronic Mediations series, 2024), engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches throughout the history of motion pictures to offer insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production. Through an exploration of radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of socio-political crises and periods of historical transition, Interactive Cinema expands notions of interactivity by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms.

Hassapopoulou’s work in film and media studies, AI, and digital humanities has been awarded honors such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Innovative Pedagogy Award (2021) and the University of Cambridge’s International Research and Collaboration Award for Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (2020-1). She is the recipient of a Digital Publication fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for her project, “Countering Media Obsolescence through Interactivity: Grappling with Issues of Access and Preservation in Interactive Cinema Traditions” (2025-27).

Her current scholarly and creative projects span a range of interactive and immersive media, AI and creative technologies, socially engaged media practices, multimedia scholarship, media archeology, digital preservation, and curatorial exhibition. She is the founder of the award-winning ExpressiveAI.net platform, one of the first interdisciplinary hubs dedicated to exploring the creative, ethical, and cultural dimensions of artificial intelligence, established in 2020-21. She is an Executive Member of The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS), an Ambassador for the World AI Film Festival (WAiFF), and an advisor for the non-profit organization Visual Voices with whom she developed an Augmented Reality (AR) border-crossing app. Some of her other open-access digital and curatorial resources include: InterArchive.net: Interactive Cinema’s companion site; the collaborative student-oriented Interactive Media Archive; the curatorial site Interactive Media Exhibition; Transformations: an online directory focused on cross-pollinations between Cinema, Media Studies and Digital Humanities; and the Weird Wave Archive: the first English-speaking student-oriented archive on contemporary Greek and diasporic cinema.