Vera Dika holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and has taught at UCLA and USC. Specializing in American film from 1973 to the present, Dika is the author of three books, The (Moving) Pictures Generation: New York Downtown Film and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: the Uses of Nostalgia (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Games of Terror: Halloween and the Films of the Stalker Cycle 1978-1983 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991). Professor Dika has written film criticism for such publications as Art in America, Artforum, Film Reader, Jump Cut, and The Los Angeles Times.

Dika’s critical writings also appear in a number of anthologies, including “The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather” in The Godfather Trilogy, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and “Between Nostalgia and Regret: Strategies of Historical Disruption from Douglas Sirk to Mad Men” in Hollywood and the American Historical Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Dika was a founding editor of Millennium Film Journal, and is currently an Associate Member of the Columbia University Film Seminar.

As an internationally recognized scholar, Dika has been invited to speak at museums, conferences, and screenings in Italy, New Zealand, as well as in New York where she has spoken at Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of the Moving Image, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, and the Columbia Film Seminar. In 2005, Professor Dika was awarded an NEH grant to attend a Summer Seminar on “German and European Studies” at Smith College. An essay on the Indianerfilme, a cycle of East German Westerns, resulted from the seminar and was published in Jump Cut magazine. Professor Dika’s current research interests include the post World War II anti-Fascist Italian films of Luigi Zampa, and their relationship to neo-realist film practice. She is also preparing a book of interviews with Downtown New York artists and filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s.