Anastasia Kostina is a scholar of documentary media, women’s film history, Soviet and Russian cinema. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, “The Mother of Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub Between Theory and Practice,” explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema. The work aims to highlight the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Concurrently, Anastasia is co-editing a collected volume titled The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, which introduces readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices of contemporary Russophone documentary cinema. In addition, her writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura, and Apparatus.