Mia Mask

Mia Mask is the Mary Riepma Ross Professor of Film at Vassar College. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. At Vassar she teaches African American cinema, documentary history, seminars on the horror genre and auteurs like Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Charles Burnett and William Greaves. She also teaches feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and genre courses.

She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, published by University of Illinois Press. Divas on Screen was featured on the NPR program "Tell Me More." Mask edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema, published by Routledge. And, she published the jointly edited collection, Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age (Bloomsbury).

Mask has written film reviews and covered festivals for IndieWire.com, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Time Out New York, The Poughkeepsie Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her criticism was anthologized in Best American Movie Writing. She has been a visiting professor at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly essays have appeared in journals such as Black Camera, and The Black Scholar. They have also been anthologized in African American National Biography; Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s; Film and Literature; and American Cinema of the 1970's.

Her cultural commentary has been featured on National Public Radio programs “Tell Me More,” “Marketplace” and “Morning Edition,” on Soledad O'Brien’s “Matter of Fact,” and in documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, the Criterion Channel and CNN’s The Movies.