Mia Mask, Associate Professor of Film, received her Ph.D. from New York University. Before teaching at Vassar, she taught Cinema Studies at The College of Staten Island-CUNY, Media Studies at The New School, and Film History at Tufts University, where she was a Multicultural Teaching Fellow. At Vassar College she teaches African American cinema, documentary film history, seminars on special topics such as the horror film, and auteurs like Spike Lee. She also teaches feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and genre courses. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, published by University of Illinois Press. Divas on Screen was featured on the radio program "Tell Me More." Formerly an assistant editor and regular contributor at Cineaste magazine, she has written film reviews and covered festivals for IndieWire.com, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Time Out New York, The Poughkeepsie Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her criticism was anthologized in Best American Movie Writing, 1999. She has been a visiting professor of Film Studies at Yale University. She has twice been a visiting scholar at New York University. In 2011-2012, she was a visiting professor at University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly essays are published in the African American National Biography, Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s, Film and Literature, and American Cinema of the 1970's. She edited Contemporary Black American Cinema, published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis in 2012. In 2014 she published Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age. In 2006, 2007 and 2008 she served at the Institute of International Education as a member of the National Screening Committee assembled to select Fulbright scholars. Her cultural commentary has been heard on National Public Radio.