Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Bio

Althea Wasow is a 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow completing her Ph.D. in Film & Media and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation analyzes the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion pictures corroborated and subverted each other’s projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has presented her work at Lüdwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender, SCMS, the Yale Conference on Television, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Wasow is the recipient of the Mellon-Chancellor and the Jacob K. Javits fellowships. She has taught courses on avant-garde film, film & media and policing, and the history of photography at UC Berkeley, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts/The New School, and NYU. She has also taught in jails and prisons in New York and California, including San Quentin State Prison, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and Rikers Island. She co-organized “Cinema Across Media: The 1920s,” UC Berkeley’s first international conference on silent cinema.

Wasow was educated in the New York City public school system and holds a B.A. in modern culture and media from Brown University and an M.F.A. in film directing from Columbia University, School of the Arts Film Division. Her films have screened at national and international film festivals and won awards, including “Best Short Film” from HBO’s New York International Latino Film Festival. Wasow is a co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that uses the power of art, design, and collaboration to increase meaningful civic engagement.