PhD Research Profiles

  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD Candidate Sinéad Anae

    Sinéad Anae

    Liquid Ambits: The Queer Oceanic through Cinematic Submersion and Emergent Media Ecologies

    My dissertation presents an analytical scaffolding with which to frame readings of queer and ecological cinema and other new emergent media artwork. Using elements of the oceanic—fluidity, submersion, buoyancy—to navigate toward transsensorial inquiry, my work also aims to reposition queerness into the realm of the natural.

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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD Student Afi Venessa Appiah

    Afi Venessa Appiah

    My research advocates for the conceptual and analytical application of eroticism as an essential yet overlooked lens in African cinematic studies. My dissertation will examine representations of sexuality, the erotic, and the (semi-)nude Black form in African and diasporic cinema, demonstrating how filmmakers redefine the Black female body in the visual field—from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Through the universal question of Eros, I approach cinema as an intuitive site of inquiry intersecting with broader discourses in historiography, visual culture, philosophy, (post)colonialism, migration and diaspora, socio-economic dynamics, and (post)nationalism.

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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD student Yuqin He

    Yuqin He

    Yuqin He is currently a first-year doctoral student. She received her master’s degree in film studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include Sinophone cinema, animation studies and queer theory.

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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate Sophie Holzberger

    Sophie Holzberger

    Messy Histories: Collective Filmmaking and Feminist Activism in West Germany

    My 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of 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 Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate 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 Martin Scorsese Department of 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate Navnidhi Sharma

    Navnidhi Sharma

    Unexpected Itineraries: India-China Encounters in Bombay Cinema, 1930s-70s

    Navnidhi Sharma is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. Her doctoral research traces India-China history through popular cultural production in India. Through the archive of Indian cinema and print in the twentieth century, she considers how India-China history is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the history of popular cultural production in India.

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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies 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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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies 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 Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate 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 Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD Student Chenghao Clone Wen

    Chenghao Clone Wen

    Clone (Chenghao) Wen's research interests center on the transnational avant-garde, media archaeology, animism and decoloniality in the Global South. He is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a performance art curator, and member of Asia Art Association (Singapore).

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  • NYU Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies PhD candidate 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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