Marsha Gordon

Marsha Gordon is Professor and Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, where she teaches classes about Hollywood history, Hollywood directors (Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Ida Lupino), women filmmakers, documentary film, nontheatrical film, and writing about film. 

Her most recent book is Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023 hardback, 2024 paperback), which was reviewed in the LA Review of Books, New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She has also published several articles about Parrott, including the best-selling author’s first ever obituary in The New York Times, an article about why people read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby but not Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife in The Conversation, and “Women on the Verge: The Jazz Age Origins of Burnout” in LitHub. 

Marsha is also the co-author, with Robert Kolker, of the 5th edition of the widely taught film studies textbook Film, Form & Culture (2024); solo author of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Films (2017); and co-editor, with Allyson Nadia Field, of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012). 

Marsha is currently researching and writing a biography of the pioneering Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner. 

Marsha has been the recipient of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (2024), an NEH Public Scholar Fellowship (2020-2021), a National Humanities Center Fellowship (2019-2020), an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and a Woodrow Wilson Practicum Grant for work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. 

She has also co-directed, with Louis Cherry, three documentary shorts, including All the Possibilities… (2019) and Rendered Small (2017), which have played and won awards at film festivals like DOC NYC, Art FIFA, Hot Springs, Palm Springs, River Run, and Sheffield Doc Fest. Her current documentary project is This Beautiful Vision, The Artistry of Alexander Bogardy. 

For seven years Marsha contributed to a monthly show, “Movies on the Radio,” with North Carolina Museum of Art film curator Laura Boyes and Frank Stasio, on NPR-affiliate WUNC’s “The State of Things.” She regularly introduces films, gives lectures, and participates in panels all over the United States and Europe.