Ian Christie

Historian  Teacher  Commentator

About

Ian Christie FBA is a media historian and curator, currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006 and has been a visiting professor and fellow at universities in Oxford, Tampa, Stockholm, Canberra, Paris and Olomouc, and at Gresham College London 2017-21.

He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Martin Scorsese and Terry Gilliam; and his most recent are Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (2020), The Eisenstein Universe (2021), Spaces:

Exploring Spatial Experiences of Representation and Reception in Screen Media (2024), Eccentrism Turns 100: FEKS and the Early Soviet Avant-garde (2024).

Among many exhibitions he has curated and contributed to: Spellbound: Art and Film (Hayward Gallery, 1996), Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A London, 2006), Unexpected Eisenstein (GRAD, 2016) and Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017). He curated a series of exhibitions about Robert Paul and early British filmmaking between 2019 and 2021, in London and Bradford.

He is an irregular broadcaster, on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and Times Radio; and a frequent contributor to DVD and Blu-ray extras for Criterion, Studiocanal and other labels.