Masha Shpolberg

Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Film and Electronic Arts

Biography: Masha Shpolberg is a film and media scholar specializing in global documentary, Russian, Central, and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. Her first book, Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest, explores how filmmakers responded to successive waves of strikes by co-opting, confronting, or otherwise challenging the representational legacy of socialist realism. Together with Lukas Brasiskis, she is coeditor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe: From Communism to Capitalism (Berghahn Books, 2023) and with Anastasia Kostina of The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her academic articles have appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, the Polish Review, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She holds a joint PhD in film and media studies and comparative literature from Yale University and the École Normale Supérieure.

BA, Princeton University; MA, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3; Diplôme, Ecole Normale Supérieure; PhD, Yale University. At Bard since 2022.

 
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