Bernadette Wegenstein

Bernadette Wegenstein, an Austrian linguist and filmmaker, received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Vienna University in 1998. She is currently Research Professor in the department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also directs the Center of Advanced Media Studies. Her first book, on the representation of AIDS in the European Media, Die Darstellung von AIDS in den Medien, appeared in 1998 with Vienna University Press. She is the author of Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory (The MIT Press 2006), The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (in press, The MIT Press 2012), the edited volume Reality Made Over: The Culture of Reality Television Makeover Shows (special volumes of Configurations, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring issue 2008), as well as of the Living Book on Cosmetic Surgery (Open Humanities Press, 2011), and of numerous articles on body criticism, performance art, and film theory.

In 2006 she formed her own Baltimore based production company–Waystone Productions LLC–to produce and direct her first feature-length documentary film on the topic of the technologies and culture of bodily makeover called Made Over in America (2007), which is distributed through Icarusfilms.

She is currently in post-production with the documentary See You Soon Again portraying Viennese Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, and his efforts to educate Baltimore youth on the Holocaust (in collaboration with Austrian director Lukas Stepanik), and in pre-production with a documentary on breast cancer.

For more info, please download my CV.