Barbara Wurm

Dr. Barbara Wurm has been section head of the Forum since August 2023.

Born in 1973, she studied comparative literature and Slavonic and German studies in Vienna, Moscow, Innsbruck, Munich and Leipzig.

From 2020-23, she was a member of the selection committee of the Berlin International Film Festival.

Between 2012 and 2023, she was on the selection committee of goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film as well as working for almost 20 years as a presenter and programmer at DOK Leipzig and spending a year on the selection committee of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Barbara Wurm has designed film programmes for international festivals and film archives including in Vienna, Pesaro, Munich, London, Berlin, Basel, Chicago, Rotterdam, Ljubljana, Madrid, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Kyiv. She has been invited to serve on the juries of numerous festivals including the 2022 Settimana Internationale della Critica in Venice and the 2023 Proxima competition in Karlovy Vary.

As a Slavonic scholar, she has researched the Eastern European avant-garde and (post) Soviet cinema at the universities of Vienna, Basel and Berlin and has published books on subjects including Dziga Vertov and the history of Russian and Soviet film. She completed her doctorate with a dissertation on Soviet cultural films of the 1920s. The focus of her work as a research assistant at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which she is putting on hold while she heads the Forum, is on Eastern European cultural studies as well as the theory and history of film. In addition to publishing numerous papers in the fields of media and film studies, she also occasionally writes for newspapers and specialist publications including cargo, Cinema Scope, Ekran, epd Film, FILMDIENST Freitag, kinokultura.com, kolik, ray, Senses of Cinema, Sight and Sound, Springerin, taz.