PhD Research Profiles

  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD candidate Andrea Avidad

    Andrea Avidad

    Sonic Trouble: Materialist, Feminist Genealogies of Acousmatic Sound & Voice

    My dissertation traces genealogies of Acousmatic Sound and Voice in both cinematic and non-cinematic "new" media through a materialist feminist lens, moving away from formalist analytics.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD candidate Ifeanyi Awachie

    Ifeanyi Awachie

    Moving Home: Place, Power, and Past in Transnational Nigerian Women’s Video Installations

    My project looks at transnational Nigerian women's video installations, with a focus on the filmmakers and artists Sheila Chukwulozie, Onyeka Igwe, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. The project explores how these filmmakers use video installations, as opposed to theatrical films, to harness movement, both within the frame and in the gallery space, to communicate their artistic projects and generate critical spectatorship.

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  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD candidate Ryan Banfi

    Ryan Banfi

    Pinball: A Social History of an American Amusement

    Drawing on ludology, gambling theory, narratology, and reception studies, my dissertation investigates pinball’s past by tracking and analyzing the game’s stages in the context of U.S. history.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD candidate Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez

    Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez

    Cinema is not a Luxury: A Feminist Diasporic Rewriting of Latin American Cineastes Prudencia Grifell and Margot Benacerraf

    Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on feminist film historiography, Latin American film studies, and its intersections with the experiences of gender and migration. Her interests include gender and queer studies, contemporary ethics, film-philosophy, and non-fiction media.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD Candidate Dominic Clarke

    Dominic Clarke

    Queer Insignificance: Uncovering Curt McDowell

    My dissertation focuses on San Francisco based underground filmmaker Curt McDowell. Making films over a two-decade span, McDowell's works are both timeless and yet capture a specific moment in LGBTQ history, one specifically demarcated by AIDS. Mostly forgotten at this time, McDowell's films pushed gender and genre boundaries, and my analysis places them in conversation with other figures and milestones of LGBTQ film history.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD Candidate Leonard Cortana

    Leonard Cortana

    Memorializing assassinated anti-racist activists: transmediatic imaginaries and the rise of transnational and intersectional figures of resistance

    My doctoral research examines the transnational circulation of narratives about racial justice and activist movements between Brazil, South Africa, France & overseas departments, and the US, emphasizing the memorialization of political assassinations and the spread of the legacy of assassinated anti-racist activists.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD Candidate Anthony Dominguez

    Anthony Dominguez

    City, Space, and Screen: Reconfiguring the History of Times Square

    In focusing on the development of urban screens in Times Square between 1908 to the present, I offer a new history of the Great White Way by examining the influence of global capitalism on public space, architecture, corporate advertising, military powers, and video-games.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD candidate Anila Gill

    Anila Gill

    The Partitioned Self: Photography, Cinema, and Civic Memory in Lahore and Bombay (1930-1950)

    My dissertation offers three bodies of texts - photography, memoir, and cinema – as critical sites where Indian subjects worked through epistemic uncertainties under colonial regimes of sight and control. Deploying a method of anti-colonial untimeliness to project the Partition of India as a decelerated, unfinished historical moment, my research ultimately understands Partition as a process that dispersed fields of vision and produced divided perceiving selves.

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  • Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate Sophie Holzberger

    Sophie Holzberger

    Messy Histories: Collective Filmmaking and Feminist Activism in West Germany

    This dissertation examines the politics of collective filmmaking in West German feminist film history between the 1970s-1990s focusing on activist films and videos from different feminist movements.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD candidate Da Ye Kim

    Da Ye Kim

    Finding Virtual Reality: An Atlas of VR Sites and Communities

    My dissertation maps out the diverse cinematic sites of Virtual Reality (VR) and explores the people who build, occupy, and politicize those sites. The composite, transdisciplinary method envisions an extensive cartography of the VR mediascape, paying a particular attention to sites and corporeal bodies that mobilize, structure and capitalize the VR ecosystem. I consider this project as a current historical research as VR is in its vibrant process of becoming.

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  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD student Ian Russell Lehine

    Ian Russell Lehine

    Black Soil Sandbox: The Spatial Lives of Ukrainian Videogames

    “Black Soil Sandbox” explores the digital and physical spaces of Ukrainian videogames through the lenses of media history, postmemory, eco-media, ludology, and game production. It locates the spaces of Ukrainian games within a history of cine-spatial representation and asks how they play a part in “putting Ukraine on the map”. The project will feature interviews with Ukrainian videogame developers, textual analyses of gameworlds, and a close look at the transnational communities of modders that collectively reimagine those games.

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  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD candidate Sofie Cato Maas

    Sofie Cato Maas

    Next to being a PhD candidate at NYU Sofie Cato Maas is also a film critic. She studied Film at King's College London and Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford.

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  • Cinema Studies PhD Candidate Negar Taymoorzadeh

    Negar Taymoorzadeh

    Melodramatic Responses to Modernization across Turkey's Yesilcam cinema and Iran's FilmFarsi

    I work on transnational melodrama, particularly on the historical interconnections between Egyptian Golden Age melodrama, Turkey’s popular cinema (Yesilcam), and Iran’s pre-revolutionary popular Cinema (FilmFarsi).

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  • Cinema Studies PhD candidate Lauren I Treihaft

    Lauren I Treihaft

    My current doctoral research examines the ontological and epistemological limits of the contemporary discourse on temporality in an age defined by endless information streams, screen time, and binge-watching. I am interested in how our changing experience and perception of time is reflected globally in nascent cinematic forms and televisual modes.

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  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD student Juan Camilo Velásquez

    Juan Camilo Velásquez

    One Hundred Years of Simultaneity: A Comparative Analysis of Interwar and Contemporary Visual Media

    My dissertation compares theories and techniques of simultaneity in interwar cinema and in contemporary audiovisual media. Superimpositions, split screens, rear projections, blue screens, and even the union of sound and image introduced a new set of representational possibilities as two or more durations could coexist in the same image, which in turn produced new modes of spectatorship. I argue that to understand contemporary habits of distraction and aesthetic contemplation, it is crucial to consider this history of simultaneity in the moving image.

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  • NYU Cinema Studies PhD student Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang

    Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang

    Keeping Other Memories: Inside Unofficial Chinese Moving Image Archives

    Situated between historiography and cultural studies, my dissertation records and elucidates the cultures of various scales of unofficial Chinese moving image archives. It theorizes the archive as an important yet overlooked nexus point that functions as a site of memory-making activities generating cultural discourses in contemporary China.

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