Irene Lusztig uses film and video to explore the production of historical memory, and the intersections and disjunctions among personal, collective, and national memories. Her work has won film festival awards and has been screened around the world, including at the MoMA in New York, at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, at IDFA in Amsterdam, and on television in the US, Europe, and in Taiwan. She has also been the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, and the New York State Council for the Arts.

Lusztig's films take as their point of departure the exploration of the following theoretical and formal concerns: the juxtaposition of past and present, filmmaking as an act of reframing history, the interplay between archival footage and contemporary cinema verité footage, and the reinterpretation of archival and propaganda images (especially in the context of communist / post-communist society). She's interested in creating films that use hybrid formal strategies (re-enactments, collage techniques etc.) and combine visual textures (including digital video, Super 8, 16mm, found footage, television, and downloaded images) to create alternative modes of documentary expression, films that mine both the more traditional vocabulary of ethnographic / observational film and that of experimental film. By interweaving footage of different genres/textures from different historical periods, her work attempts to create a visual vocabulary that addresses interstitial spaces in history and representation.