Oksana Sarkisova

Dr. Oksana Sarkisova is Senior Research Fellow at Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University and co-founder and Steering Committee member of Visual Studies Platform at CEU. In 2004, she co-founded and in 2008-2023 directed Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Budapest. Her fields of research are cultural history, experimental cinema and the use of found footage, memory and representation, film history, amateur photography, and visual studies. She authored In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (with Olga Shevchenko, 2023), Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (2017), co-edited Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (2008), and has published in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes on film history, nationality politics, contemporary Russian and Eastern European cinema, and amateur photography. 

Oksana Sarkisova teaches courses on documentary cinema, memory politics, film history and audio-visual archives. 

She served as Jury member at several International Film Festivals, including those in Amsterdam, Graz, the Hague, Kyiv, Linz, Ljubljana, Nuremberg, Tbilisi, Vienna, Warsaw, and Zagreb. She is an Advisory Board Member of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography.

In 2025-2028, she is Executive Board member and co-PI for WP4 in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchange project Activate, which explores novel collaborative strategies of transnational research, archiving, and exhibiting social and political dissent in Europe (19th-21st centuries).