Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.

ARI Faculty Fellowship Project: What does it mean to love and feel nostalgia for the atomic bomb? RICHLAND is a feature length nonfiction film that explores the deeply ingrained systems of belief, feeling, patriotism, secrecy, dread, and denial that are shaped by everyday life in a nuclear company town. This ongoing, multi-year feature film project is a prismatic, placemaking documentary portrait of Richland that will weave together vignettes and encounters with Richland landscapes, spaces, and people, forming a timely examination of American patriotic imagination in the post-Trump era.  

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