Alisa Lebow is a documentary filmmaker, scholar, and writer. She holds a doctorate in Cinema Studies from New York University.
She currently teaches both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in film studies at the University of Sussex, UK, and conducts research that explores the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in documentary film and related media.
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 latest research looks at documentary incursions and interventions in the logics of the Anthropocene.
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).
