Anatasia Kostina

Adjunct Instructor

Film and Media Studies | Storrs

Areas of Research/Artistic Focus: Documentary cinema, women’s film history, Soviet, Russian and Eastern European film

Anastasia Kostina is a scholar of documentary cinema, women’s film history, and Russian and Soviet cinema. She holds a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Anastasia’s current book project The Mother of Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub’s Theory and Practice explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema through the lens of the career of Esfir Shub, the first, and arguably most important, female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Concurrently she is co-editing a collected volume The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, expected to be published by University of Edinburgh Press in 2024. Anastasia’s writings on film have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura, and Apparatus Journal. In addition to her research and teaching practices Anastasia is actively involved with curatorial work, in recent years she has programmed film series at Yale University and Columbia University.