Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, a scholar of (East) German cinema focusing on topics such as the role of women and film stars in socialist filmmaking, will begin her new position as associate director of the UMass Amherst DEFA Film Library on Dec. 18.  

After receiving her doctorate from UMass Amherst, she taught at Amherst College before being awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University in 2021-22.  

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There she was able to more fully explore her long-standing research interests in both environmentalism and migration in a research project examining threads between the environmental crisis in East Germany, GDR (German Democratic Republic) activism and German environmental policy today, as well as a film and discussion series on border wall environments.  

While she was a graduate student, the DEFA Film Library benefited from Rizo Lenshyn’s contributions in a variety of different roles. For example, she co-directed its 2015 Summer Film Institute on Sex, Gender & Videotape: Love, Eroticism and Romance in East Germany with Kyle Frackman (University of British Columbia); she mentored interns and student employees and fulfilled a range of administrative duties; she organized panels and event series; and she presented DEFA films at the Goethe-Institut Boston and her own work at conferences of the German Studies Association, the Coalition of Women in German, American Association of Teachers of German and the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German. Thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, she worked on the Jörg Foth Collection, establishing a baseline structure for DEFA- and GDR-related collections at Special Collections and University Archives.  

The breadth of Rizo Lenshyn’s professional experience and her intimate knowledge of East German history and cinema, as well as her administrative acumen represent tremendous assets for the DEFA Film Library moving forward, the organization says.