Dr. Irina Leimbacher

Irina Leimbacher has been a faculty member in Film Studies at Keene State College since 2010. Her Ph.D. is from UC Berkeley, her M.F.A. from San Francisco State, and her B.A. from Yale. Her research and writing primarily focus on nonfiction and experimental film and media in a global context. She has published in Discourse, Film Comment, La Critica Sociologica, Wide Angle, Bright Lights, Camerawork and Release Print and presented numerous papers at SCMS and Visible Evidence. As a film curator she worked at SF Cinematheque and co-founded kino21, and she has presented programs at the Flaherty Seminar, San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive, UCLA Film Archive, MoMA New York, Cinematheque Ontario, NYFF Projections, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and at other venues. She continues to occasionally curate film programs and to serve on film juries. Her articles and book chapters can be found on the academia.edu website. She has received research grants from Keene State College Faculty Development, the Whiting Foundation, FACE (French American Cultural Exchange), Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, LEF California, and Film Arts Foundation.

At Keene State College Irina has developed and taught classes on Film History, Metacinema, Essay Films, Slow Cinemas, First-Person Filmmaking, Film and Social Change in the 1960s, Iranian Cinema, Post New-Wave French Cinema, World Cinema, and Film Exhibition, among others. She has also advised the student-run Film Society for a number of years, and organized dozens of in-person film events for the Film Studies Department. Irina tries to engage students in exploring unconventional, independent, international works from all over the globe. When possible, she incorporates filmmaking projects into her critical studies classes; she strongly believes in integrating theory and practice.

Irina has also taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, San Francisco Art Institute, the Florence, Italy program of Sarah Lawrence College, and most recently at CalArts in Los Angeles where she will be teaching in Spring 2022.