Anatoli Ulyanov is a media researcher and documentary filmmaker whose interdisciplinary work bridges Environmental Humanities, Visual Anthropology, and Critical Media Studies. He investigates how toxic narratives and visual regimes shape identity, legitimize violence, and fracture social and ecological relations across post-Soviet and global contexts.
His research integrates documentary film, archival remix, and sensory ethnography to examine propaganda, cultural memory, and affective discourse. Drawing on new materialisms, ecofeminism, and postcolonial critique, Ulyanov explores relational repair, multispecies kinship, and emancipatory political imaginaries.
Before his doctoral work at UCLA, he led international media initiatives at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, developing public-facing projects on suppressed histories and the legacies of mass violence. He has also collaborated with global platforms, including Dose of Society, and contributed to an AI initiative advancing hate speech detection and extremism prevention on YouTube.
Recent projects have spanned Soviet-era media, gender and labor in cinema, and the analysis of hate offender typologies and behavior for the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, in collaboration with the California State Commission on Hate and the California Department of Civil Rights. His current project, From War to Peace, examines how propaganda disrupts cultural and ecological relations—and how counter-narratives might reimagine care, kinship, and post-conflict repair.
Recent texts:
