Alisa Lebow is a documentary filmmaker, film scholar, and writer.
She is Emerita Professor of Screen Media at the University of Sussex, where she taught film studies for 13 years. Her academic research explores the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in documentary film and related media. She is currently Visiting Professor in the School of Arts at Queen Mary, University of London, and is co-editor of Documentary Dimensions book series, Bloomsbury Publishing.
She has written extensively on first person film as a culturally and ideologically imbricated practice of identity production. She is intrigued by the intersection between practice and theory, and her Filming Revolution project, winner of the 2020 SCMS Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship, attempts to perform film studies intermedially. Her current research looks at documentary incursions and interventions in the logics of the Anthropocene and documentary futurisms.
Alisa is originally from NY and currently lives in London.
In addition to her academic work, Alisa has curated
programs for the Barbican Cinema, The Istanbul Film Festival, Istanbul Modern, The Arnolfini Gallery
and other venues. She has also served on juries for several international documentary film festivals.
Her films include For the Record:
The World Tribunal on Iraq (co-directed with Zeynep Dadak, Enis Köstepen,
and Başak Ertür, 2007), Treyf (co-directed with Cynthia Madansky, 1998),
Internal Combustion (co-directed with Cynthia Madansky, 1995) and Outlaw
(1994).
