The Maya Brin Residency Program and UMD Libraries are pleased to host Vladimir Paperny, an author, designer, architectural historian, and emeritus faculty member of the University of California, Los Angeles. Paperny’s work spans the fine and applied arts, visual popular media, design, and preservation from Moscow to Los Angeles and from the Stalin era to the present.

Please join us for an evening with Paperny in conversation with scholar and cultural critic Sasha Razor (University of California, Santa Barbara).

Vladimir Paperny is the 2025 Maya Brin Resident at the University of Maryland. He is an author, designer, architectural historian, and emeritus faculty member of the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his MA in design from Stroganov Art School in Moscow, and his PhD in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities. His PhD thesis, Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin, was published in Russian by ARDIS (Ann Arbor, 1985) and later by NLO (Moscow, 1996), in English (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in Czech (Arbor Vitae), and in Italian (Artemide). Since moving to the United States in 1981, Dr. Paperny has been a visiting professor at USC, UCLA, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and Bristol University, UK. Paperny co-edited Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1958: Messages of Peace and Images of War (Ashgate, 2015). His articles, essays and columns (in both English and Russian) appear in many publications, including Architectural Digest, Project Russia, Speech, Vogue, SNOB and many others. His collections of essays (in Russian) include Mos Angeles, Mos Angeles-2 (NLO) and Fuck Context? (TATLIN). He recently published Cinema, Culture, and the Zeitgeist (Kino, kul’tura, i dukh vremeni, NLO, 2023), and has a new book of memoirs coming out later this year: How I was a Designer (Kak ia byl dezainerom, NLO, 2025).

Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies and Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2020 with a dissertation on screenwriting and leftist cultural movements in Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Her research spans archival praxis, media archaeology, and migration studies, with a focus on Russian, Soviet, and East European film histories. She is the founding director of the Russophone Los Angeles Research Collective and is currently co-editing two volumes on Belarusian visual culture and cinema. In addition to her academic work, Razor writes cultural journalism for the Los Angeles Review of Books and contributes to public scholarship through curatorial projects and civic initiatives.