Catherine Masud

Assistant Professor In-Residence, Human Rights Documentary Filmmaking

Catherine Masud holds a joint appointment with the Department of Digital Media and Design within the School of Fine Arts and the Human Rights Institute at UConn. She is also an internationally award-winning filmmaker and spent much of her filmmaking career overseas, primarily in Bangladesh. Thematically, many of her films address economic and social justice issues, war and genocide, and the conflict between religious and cultural identity. Her first fiction feature, Matir Moina (The Clay Bird), which she produced, co-wrote, and edited, won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes and became the first Bangladeshi film to compete in the Oscars. Her films have received support from such international grant-giving entities as the Ford Foundation, the Hubert Bals Fund, and the French Government South Fund, among others. Her latest film project is A Double Life, a documentary feature about a civil rights lawyer who spent 13 years on the run from the FBI. She also has a special research interest in the use of human rights-themed archives for teaching, scholarship, and visual storytelling, and has recently been awarded the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) Certificate from the Society of American Archivists. In addition to her teaching work, while at UConn Catherine has engaged in special documentary projects involving the University’s Thomas J. Dodd Nuremberg Collections, the Armenian Memory Project, and a tribute project on human rights scholar Wiktor Osiatyński. She holds an MFA in film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in development studies from Brown University.