Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communications and Creative Arts. She is the author of eight books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics, including 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018 (BearManor, 2020), The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017), Suspiria (Auteur Publishing, 2015), Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2014), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011), The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland & Co., 2021), and the Bram Stoker Award nominated book Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019). Alexandra has co-edited a number of books including Strickland (Queensland Film Festival, 2020), ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Routledge, 2018), Cattet & Forzani (Queensland Film Festival, 2018), and Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018), which was the catalogue for the 2018 Australian Centre for the Moving Exhibition of the same name.

Alexandra has published more than twenty book chapters on subjects including women’s filmmaking, cult, horror and exploitation cinema, and representations of sexual violence in film, and is a regular contributor of commentaries, visual essays and liner notes for home entertainment releases from internationally renowned boutique companies including Arrow, Kino Lorber, Eureka Entertainment, Indicator, Second Sight and the BFI. She is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists and the Australian Film Critics Association, and has worked as a programmer and consultant for film festivals in Australia and internationally. Alexandra holds a PhD in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is a Research Fellow at RMIT University.