Mia Mask
Associate Professor of Film
Office: Vogelstein Cntr Drama and Film 318
Phone: 845.437.5244
Mia L. Mask, Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Drama and Film, received her Ph.D. from New York University. Before coming to Vassar in 2000, she taught Film Studies at The College of Staten Island-CUNY, graduate Media Studies at The New School, and Film History at Tufts University, where she was the 1997 Multicultural Teaching Fellow. In 1996, she received the Alan C. Greenberg Award.
Ms. Mask teaches courses on feminist film theory, African American film history and theory, African national cinemas, documentary film and genre theory.
Formerly an assistant editor and regular contributor at Cineaste magazine, she has written film reviews for IndieWire.com, The Village Voice, Abafazi: Simmons College Journal, Film Quarterly and The Poughkeepsie Journal. Her criticism appeared in Best American Movie Writing, 1999. She has covered numerous film festivals including: The Urban World Film Festival, The African Film Festival at Lincoln Center, The Human Rights Watch Film Festival and The Woodstock Film Festival. In the spring of 2003, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. She has been a visiting scholar at NYU. Her essays are published in the African American National Biography, Film and Literature, and American Cinema of the 1970s, a volume in the Screen Decades series published by Rutgers University Press. Her book Divas of the Silver Screen: Black Women in American Film, 1950-Present is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is co-editing an anthology with Manthia Diawara entitled Black American Cinema Reconsidered. Her television interviews include appearances on The Full Nelson and American Movie Classics.
In 2006 and 2007 she served on the National Screening Committee convened by the Institute of International Education to select Fulbright scholars.