Irene Lusztig was born in England to Romanian parents, grew up in Boston and now lives in New York City. She has also lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. A Visiting Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in 2005-6, she received her BA in filmmaking and Chinese studies from Harvard, and completed her MFA in film and video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College. In addition to making her own films, she works as a freelance editor and teacher. Her work has won film festival awards and has been screened around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, at IDFA in Amsterdam, and on television in the US, Europe, and in Taiwan. She has also been the recipient of major grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, and the New York State Council for the Arts. Lusztig’s most recent film, The Samantha Smith Project, is an experimental documentary that explores historical amnesia, nostalgia, and US foreign policy through a meditation on the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and the media phenomenon of child diplomats. Her previous films are Reconstruction (2001), winner of the Boston Film Critics’ Society “Discoveries” award, For Beijing with Love and Squalor (1997), and Crema Roz (1996).