Mia Mask is Professor of Film at Vassar College. She received her Ph.D. from New York University at the Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, published by University of Illinois Press. Formerly an assistant editor and contributor atCineaste magazine, she has written film reviews and covered festivals for IndieWire.com, the Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Time Out New York, thePoughkeepsie Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her criticism was anthologized in Best American Movie Writing, 1999. In the spring of 2003, she was a visiting Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. During the 2011-12 academic year she was a visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly essays are published in the African American National Biography, Film and Literature, American Cinema of the 1970s and Pretty People: Movies Stars of the 1990s. In 2012 she published the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema (Routledge). In 2014, she published the co-edited anthology Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age (Bloomsbury). Her cultural commentary has been heard on National Public Radio. 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.
