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Mia L. Mask
Associate Professor of Drama and Film
B.A., Tufts University; M.A., Ph.D., New York University

CDF 318 / Box 628 / 845.437.5244
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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, and Film Quarterly. Her criticism appeared in Best American Movie Writing, 1999. In the spring of 2003, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. Currently a visiting scholar at New York University, she has essays 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.

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