Szilvia Ruszev

Szilvia Ruszev is a film editor, media artist and practice-based researcher working across media.

Her interdisciplinary research interest is situated in the fields of cinema and media studies, new materialism and digital studies intersecting various methodologies of a creative-critical praxis. Some of the recurring themes in her research are sensuous knowledge, expanded montage theories, and politics of post-cinema with a specific focus on the entanglement of networked technologies, capitalism and representation of social categories such as race, class and gender.

She is the Principal Investigator of the BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) funded ‘Shared Post-Human Imagination’ research project at Bournemouth University. The project investigates responsible AI in the context of media production. The research seeks to foster relationships among developers, users and policymakers to develop responsible AI practices.

As a film editor, she has 20+ years of experience in various genres. She has expertise in immersive media, feature-length documentaries, feature films, TV documentaries (Arte and ZDF), corporate films, music videos, video art, and shorts. She has worked with a great variety of internationally acclaimed directors such as Peter Greenaway, Anders Østergaard, and János Szász. The projects have been awarded at numerous prestigious film festivals such as the Grand Prix at Karlovy Vary IFF, or the shortlist at the 86th Academy Awards in the foreign-language category.

As a media artist, she has experimented with the materiality of time-based media arching from super8 film to digital and expanded cinema in the form of site-specific installations, computational work in the form of cinematic visualizations and virtual reality essays, thereby constantly challenging the technological affordances and cultural situatedness of the given medium. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Siggraph, Codame, Femmebit and Geneva International Film Festival.

Szilvia has a 10+ years experience in teaching media practice and theory at the Film University Babelsberg, Germany; the International Film School in Cologne, Germany; and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, USA among others.

Szilvia studied Film Theory at the Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary) and Film Editing at the Film University Babelsberg (Germany). She holds PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California.

Topics of PhD supervision: editing theory and practice (experimental film, video art, independent film), synthetic media (generative AI, VR, AR) in a socio-technological context, practice-based research (video essay, visualisations, digital humanities), representation in media.