Aleksandra Simonova is a Russian-born and US-based anthropologist and filmmaker. She is PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. In her work, she combines an interest in writing and theoretic exploration with visual and sensorial experience. 

She has a background in political studies and sociology with BA from Moscow State University and MA from European University at St. Petersburg. She started to be interested in filmmaking while being a research fellow at Strelka Institute for media, architecture and design in Moscow, where she pursued research on the utopian ideas that influenced the social imagination and built environment of Soviet cities. Following this research she did her first experimental film on how the future was envisioned in the past both in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Recognizing the power of images and film she was filming while doing fieldwork for her PhD in Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. The complexity of Crimea as a contested region made the film the relevant media to show the reality of living there. She finished an experimental film called Playing Apocalypse (2022) based on a role-play game organized in Crimean bomb-shelters in 2019. The film follows a group of enthusiasts, who explored different versions of the future designed as a post-apocalyptic world. The role-playing game is a way of processing the memory of previous wars and reflecting on the possibility of nuclear war —a reflection that today seems uncanny in light of Russia’s invasion to Ukraine.

The Russian invasion to Ukraine in 2022, which broke out in 2022, brought many questions that Aleksandra posed in her PhD research to her personal life. What does it mean to be a Russian-speaking scholar in the US academy, what does it mean to be a Russian woman in the US society, and finally, how Russian mother could raise a US-born baby in an American family? She addressed those questions in the self-ethnographic film Self-portrait with Lev (2022).