Bard Faculty News
Masha Shpolberg
Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts
Academic Program Affiliation(s): Film and Electronic Arts
About Masha Shpolberg Masha Shpolberg is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. Her research examines how cinema mediates social, political, and ecological transformations across Eastern Europe. Her first book, Labor after Socialist Realism: Polish Cinema and the Reimagining of the Worker 1968–1989, traces how filmmakers responded to successive waves of labor protest by transforming the image of the worker and redefining cinema’s relationship to the state. She is co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe: From Communism to Capitalism (Berghahn Books, 2023) and The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, The Polish Review, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. She has also contributed criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a joint PhD in film and media studies and comparative literature from Yale University and the École Normale Supérieure.