Erika Balsom is a Reader in Film and Media Studies at King’s College London, focusing on the histories, aesthetics, and politics of nonfiction cinemas.

She has published extensively on the intersections of art and the moving image, often focusing on questions of technological change and examining the relationship between artistic practices and their institutional contexts.

She is the author of five books: The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture (2026), TEN SKIES (2021), An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018), After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation (2017), and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013). She is the co-editor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022), Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines (2021), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (2019), and Documentary Across Disciplines (2016).

In 2026, Balsom was the recipient of fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the British School at Rome. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In addition to her scholarly work, she is active as a film critic and curator. Together with Hila Peleg, Erika curated the exhibition "No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image." Focusing on nonfiction filmmaking by women in a global context from the 1970s to the 1990s, it originated at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and subsequently toured internationally.

Research interests

• Experimental and artists’ cinemas

• Documentary

• Film and Media Theory

• Feminist filmmaking

Teaching

Erika Balsom has taught modules on avant-garde film, moving image installation, digital cinema, film and media theory, contemporary art, documentary cinema, and film culture.

Expertise and public engagement

In addition to her academic scholarship, Erika is a member of the London Film Critics Circle and writes regularly for publications such as Film Comment, Frieze, Sight & Sound.

She is a former trustee at LUX and a member of the ICA Independent Film Council. She is a contributing editor at Discourse and has served on numerous editorial boards, including the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, MUBI Notebook, and the Whitechapel/MIT book series Documents of Contemporary Art.

She has served on numerous film festival juries, including Punto de Vista (Spain), CPH:DOX (Denmark), Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (Japan), Jeonju International (South Korea), and Images Festival (Canada).

From 2018–26, she was a member of the collective The Machine That Kills Bad People, which programmed a bimonthly screening of films by women at ICA London.

Selected publications

• The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture (Columbia University Press, 2026).
• "Feminist Observation: The Case of Un processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape, 1979)," Camera Obscura 40, no. 3 (2025), 1–34.
• “Reflections on an Exhibition: The Many Worlds of ‘No Master Territories’” New Left Review 139 (January/February 2023), 105–128.
• Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, co-edited with Hila Peleg (MIT Press/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2022).
• TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021).