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Irene Lusztig

Professor, Film & Digital Media
Director of Graduate Studies, Social Documentation MFA (starting fall 2023)
Research Interests: 

archives and archival practices; feminist filmmaking; experimental documentary; historical memory; feminist historiography; nuclear cultures; essay filmmaking; scientific and medical film; Communism and post-communism; the body.

Phone: 
email only
Office: 111 Communications
Selected Publications: 

Richland, 93 min. film, 2023

Contents Inventory, 31 min. film, 2021

Yours in Sisterhood, 101 min. film, 2018, distributed by Women Make Movies

Forty Years, 12 min. video 2016

Maternity Test, 14 min. video loop for gallery, New Maternalisms Chile 2014

The Motherhood Archives in Triple Canopy, interactive audiovisual essay, 2014

The Motherhood Archives, 2013, 91 min film, distributed by Women Make Movies.

The Worry Box Project, 20011-ongoing, web-based participatory archive and video installation.

The Samantha Smith Project, 2005, 59 min film.

Reconstruction, 2001, 90 min film, distributed by Women Make Movies

For Beijing with Love and Squalor, 1997, 59 min film.

Honors and Awards: 
MacDowell Fellow, 2006 and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, 2018 Fulbright Fellow (Portugal), 2017 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, 2010-11
Education and Training: 
M.F.A., Bard College
B.A., Harvard University
Biography: 
IRENE LUSZTIG is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present-tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim (2021), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, two MacDowell fellowships, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.
Teaching Interests: 

documentary filmmaking, experimental documentary, feminist film practices, representing historical memory, archival media practices, audiovisual ethnography, autobiographical film, documentary editing.