ATLAS 345
Research
As a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies (2013-2014) and Visiting Scholar in the Film Studies Program and the Brakhage Center for Media Arts (2014-2015), Dr. Shira Segal has taught a wide range of film courses and is an active researcher in autobiographical cinema across avant-garde and documentary cinema.
She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from Indiana University’s Dept. of Communication and Culture, where her dissertation Home Movies and Home Birth: The Avant-garde Childbirth Film and Pregnancy in New Media provides an aesthetic and cultural history of alternative film and media practices surrounding the maternal body over the past fifty years. This project includes interviews with filmmakers and original archival research with the James Stanley Brakhage Collection, housed by the Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.
For her MA in Cultural Memory from the University of London’s Institute of Romance Studies, Segal’s thesis examines the transmission of private and public memory in photography and experimental film; selections of this thesis on Hollis Frampton’s film (nostalgia) have been published by the University of Texas at Austin’s Text, Practice and Performancejournal. Segal is also an undergraduate alumni from the University of Colorado’s Film Studies Program.
Research interests include The Embodied Camera: Visual Strategies of the Self in Avant-garde Cinema. Her book chapter “Stories of the Self in Cinema: Autobiography and the Documentary Image” appears in American Creative Nonfiction (Salem Press, 2015). Further publications include articles in MP: An Online Feminist Journal, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, and Wig: Journal of Experimental Scholarship. She has given public lectures on Stan Brakhage and First Person Cinema at Ohio State University and the University of Washington.