Althea Wasow is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Her current book project, “Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives,” analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include silent film and precinematic visual culture, black studies, comparative ethnic studies, and critical carceral studies. She obtained her PhD in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

Wasow wrote and directed the wannabe, a film that won Best Short at HBO’s New York International Latino Film Festival. In addition to national and international film festivals, her films have screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Queens Museum of Art.

Most recently, Wasow taught courses on the history of avant-garde film, film & media and policing, and the history and theory of photography at UC Berkeley, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts/The New School, and NYU. In addition, she has taught in jails and prisons in New York and California, including San Quentin State Prison, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and Rikers Island. Wasow co-founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a nonprofit organization that uses the power of art and design to increase meaningful civic engagement.