Fellowship / Fellows

Irene Lusztig

  • 2010–2011
  • Arts
  • David and Roberta Logie Fellow and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow
  • University of California, Santa Cruz
Headshot of Irene Lusztig
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker and assistant professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her first feature-length work, Reconstruction (2001), is a personal essay film built around a controversial bank heist in communist Romania (in which her maternal grandmother was implicated) and the subsequent production of a government-sponsored film reenacting the crime (also called Reconstruction). Her most recent work, The Samantha Smith Project (2005), is an experimental documentary meditation on post–Cold War historical amnesia, nostalgia, the manufacturing and dismantling of political enemies, and the contemporary Russian landscape. Lusztig is currently working on The Motherhood Archives, an experimental documentary project exploring the historical construction of motherhood. She will interweave a visual, archival history of 20th-century childbirth/child-care education films with contemporary documentary material to form a multilayered cine-essay problematizing the manufacturing of modern motherhood as identity, ideology, scientific construct, and psychological state. Lusztig’s award-winning films have been screened around the world, including at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; Pacific Film Archive; and on television in the United States and abroad. She has also received grants from the LEF Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She received her BA in filmmaking and Chinese studies from Harvard University and her MFA in film and video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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