Marusya Bociurkiw

Marusya Bociurkiw is a storyteller and theorist, and Professor of Media Theory at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she teaches courses in media studies, social justice media and documentary production, and conducts research in the areas of feminist/queer archives, affect theory, media activism, and migration studies.

She is also an award-winning filmmaker and author. She has directed 10 films, and is author of 6 books including, most recently, Food Was her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions). Her most recent film, the award-winning documentary “This Is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine”, screened in 12 countries and was translated into 3 languages. Her books have won and been shortlisted for several awards including Kobzar Award, Lambda Literary Award and Independent Publisher Award.

She is the recipient of The Creative School’s SRC Award (2014) and the Ryerson-wide Knowledge Mobilization & Engagement Award (2018), in recognition of her community-based research creation in the areas of affect theory, feminist archival studies, LGBT activism and migration studies Her monograph, Feeling Canadian: Television Nationalism & Affect (WLU Press) is widely used in media studies and communications courses. She is a longtime organizer and activist, and is Co-Director of The Studio for Media Activism & Critical Thought at Ryerson, which has organized over 25 events/symposia since 2015, on a wide variety of topics including feminist/queer/BIPOC archives, disability arts, police violence, and the neoliberal university. She is Principal Investigator on the SSHRC-funded international project, “Finding Home: Migration, Placemaking & Research Creation. She is currently working on a new documentary called “Before #MeToo: The Story of a Feminist Media Revolution.” She currently publishes a food blog called Recipes For Trouble: A Pandemic Food Diary, which examines pandemic foodways through an intersectional feminist lens.

Recent publications:

Bociurkiw, M. (2016). Big affect: The emphemeral archive of second-wave feminist video collectives in Canada. Camera Obscura (Durham, NC), 93, 5.

Bociurkiw, M. (2018a). Bringing Back Memory. In L. Grekul & L. Ledohowski (Eds.), Unbound (Vol. 1–Book, Section, pp. 73–85). University of Toronto Press.

Bociurkiw, M. (2018b). Food was her country. Dagger Editions is an imprint of Caitlin Press.

Grekul, L., Ledohowski, L., & Bociurkiw, M. (2016). Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians writing home. University of Toronto Press. 

Sample of supervised ComCult projects:

2019 - Meera Govindasamy; Project-Paper: Legal Education Podcasting for Newcomers to Ontario