Dr. Julia Alekseyeva is a multi-modal scholar of media, film, and culture, specializing in the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a core faculty member of the Cinema and Media Studies Program (CIMS). Her courses frequently combine history, theory, and media production elements. She specializes in the film and media production of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Her work bridges the public and the academic, and she has co-led workshops on theories of antifascism and abolition, grassroots comics creation, and political artmaking. She recently completed her first academic monograph, tentatively entitled Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s. 

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Dr. Alekseyeva is also a graphic artist specializing in non-fiction graphic narratives, comics journalism, and memoir. Her first full-length graphic novel, a nonfiction historical memoir entitled Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution, was published by Microcosm in January 2017, and won the 2017 VLA Diversity Award. Since 2017 she has published shorter non-fiction graphic essays in both peer-reviewed journals/book anthologies (Sequentials, Concentric, The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation, Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights, Resistance, Recognition) and in popular outlets such as The Nib, Jewish Currents, Paper Brigade, and Lilith.

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She is a socialist and ardent antifascist, and her creative and academic work reflects her values.