Dr. Oksana Sarkisova is Research Fellow at Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University and co-founder and Head of Visual Studies Platform (VSP) at CEU. In 2004, she co-founded (with Zsuzsanna Zádori) and in 2008-2023 directed Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Budapest, currently serving as festival's program advisor. Her fields of research are cultural history, experimental cinema and the use of found footage, memory and representation, film history, ethnographies of home-mode photography and artistic practices of using amateur images. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes on film history, nationality politics, contemporary Russian and Eastern European cinema, and amateur photography. She teaches courses on documentary cinema, film history, visual studies, and memory politics.
Dr Sarkisova designed and directed CEU Summer University Programs Documentary Cinema in the Digital Century (2013), Screened Memories: Historical Narratives and Contemporary Visual Culture (2016), Fields of Vision: Memory, Identity, and Images of the Past (2019), and most recently The Power of the Visual: Creative Documentary and Human Rights (2024). She also participated as tutor and invited faculty in the workshop series Cinema Without Borders (by Movies that Matter HRIFF), Summer School on Cinema and Human Rights (Galway), This is Film! 2023. Film Heritage in Practice public lecture series (by Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam), among others.
Sarkisova served as Jury member at several International Film Festivals, including those in Nuremberg, Kyiv, Zagreb, Warsaw, Tbilisi, Linz, the Hague, Ljubljana, Graz, and Vienna. Since 2024, she is an Advisory Board Member of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography.