Tanya Shilina-Conte is Assistant Professor of Global Film Studies in the Department of English, University at Buffalo. Her academic interests include transnational, diasporic, and exilic film cultures, film-philosophy, Deleuze Studies, and theories of affect and non-representation. She teaches a wide variety of courses in Film and Media Theory, Film History, Cinema in the Post-media Age, Global Film and Media, and Color and the Moving Image. Her current research focuses on the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical significance of visual and sonic absence, both as an introduction to the overlooked or suppressed phenomena during different periods of film history and as exposure to alternative means of representation in film and media arts. Her articles have been published in Screen, Film-Philosophy, Frames Cinema Journal, Word & Image, Studia Phænomenologica, Iran Namag, Leitura: Teoria & Pratica, Studia Linguistica, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and elsewhere. She is now completing her book manuscript, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine (under contract with Oxford University Press), which explores visual absence from early cinema to post-cinema through the lens of film-philosophy. She has also begun work on a new book project, tentatively titled Anonymous Cinema in the Global Age.
Prof. Shilina-Conte’s research has been supported by the UB Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship; UB Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Research Grant; Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Program Award, SUNY; Centro Congressi Stefano Franscini Grant, Switzerland; Lisbon Consortium Grant, Catholic University of Portugal; Princeton-Weimar Grant, International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-Universität; and Philipps University Grant, Germany. In the past she was also the recipient of the Canadian-American Studies Grant, George Soros Open World Society Grant, American Councils for International Education Grant and National Council for Economic Education Grant.
Prof. Shilina-Conte has founded the Center for Global Film Studies at the University at Buffalo. She also directs the interdisciplinary Global Film Minor and curates the Global Film Festival, which was held at the Burchfield Penney Art Center before the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2016-2018, the film series focused on Iranian, Cuban, and Mexican cinemas, and was sponsored by the WNY non-profit organization riverrun and the NY Council for the Humanities. The most recent Fall 2021 virtual series featured Chinese-language cinemas from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and was sponsored by UB’s Confucius Institute.
