Pauline Shongov is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice explores senses of place, collective memory, and cultural mythologies. Her work engages with the afterlives of second-world modernities: the contested heritage left behind by those transitional economies and the lives of people caught up in this long durée. She is currently at work on several projects in the Balkans: a region shaped by the competing pulls of the East and the West, the incomplete archives of the 20th century, and a growing global uncertainty in the age of extraction. Drawing on speculative archaeology and the Western genre, these projects develop new modes of inquiry, observation, and research into land and the human and non-human forces that shape it.
Her work has been supported by the LEF-Flaherty Fellowship, Harvard Film Study Center, ArtLab at Harvard, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard Presidential Fellowship, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, Harvard Critical Media Practice Program, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She is the cofounder, with Maya Shopova, of Afield Practice: a research initiative at the intersection of heritage studies, environmental humanities, and critical media practice. She holds a B.F.A. and B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University.
