Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research and publications focus broadly on independent and underground cinemas, including experimental and adult film, women’s filmmaking practices, and theories of embodiment, materiality, and duration.

She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Wanda (BFI Film Classics/Bloomsbury, 2025) and The Prop (with John David Rhodes, Fordham University Press, 2025), and co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minnesota University Press, 2012). Gorfinkel was the recipient of a 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her ongoing book project on “cinemas of exhaustion.”

In addition to her scholarly work, Gorfinkel writes criticism and curates film programmes; including “Grandma’s Grammar” at Open City Documentary Film Festival, as well as the first UK retrospective of Kira Muratova at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival.

Prior to arriving at King’s in 2017, she was Associate Professor of Art History and Film Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she taught from 2009-2016.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Independent, underground, experimental, and adult film
• Women’s filmmaking and feminist histories
• American film history and historiography
• Sexuality and embodiment, performance and labour
• Global art cinemas and cinephilias

Teaching

Gorfinkel teaches modules on independent cinemas, women’s filmmaking, carnal cinemas, and film history and theory.

Expertise and Public Engagement 

Gorfinkel has given keynote and invited lectures internationally including the Kracauer Lecture at Goethe University-Frankfurt, Cinepoetics Lecture, Frei Universiteit Berlin – Arsenal Archive, Yale University, University of Chicago, University of Cambridge, Monash University, Vanderbilt University; as well as presented talks and held conversations with filmmakers at the British Film Institute, Institute of Contemporary Art London, the Barbican, Tate Modern, LUX, Close Up, Light Industry, and other film and art venues.

Gorfinkel serves or has served on the editorial and advisory boards of several academic journals, including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, World Picture and as Film Editor of ASAP Journal, as well as on the Screening Sex book series (Edinburgh UP). From 2017-2020 she was the co-chair of the Adult Film & Media History Special Interest Group of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.

Gorfinkel also regularly writes criticism for venues such as Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, Cinemascope, Criterion, and Another Gaze, and is a member of the London Film Critics Circle. She has written liner essays and appeared in video interviews for the video distributors Criterion Collection, Arbelos Films, Second Run and Studio Canal. She has also served on several film juries including Documenta Madrid and Open City Documentary Film Festival.

Selected Publications

• "Carnal Densities," in Damon Ross Young, ed. "Body, Genre, Apparatus: Rereading Linda Williams on Pornography" dossier, Porn Studies, Vol 11, No 2 (2024) 12-17. 
• “Sleeping in the Movie Theater (After Wanda Goronski)” in Shanay Jhaveri, ed. Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark Sweden: Cornerhouse/ Shoestring Publisher, 2024.
• "The Bed (Andy Warhol & Danny Williams, 1965)," in John Hanhardt, ed. The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne 1963-1965 New York: Yale University Press/ Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021.  Book winner of the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award
• "Cinema of the Grandmother"; in Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, eds. Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image London: MIT Press, 2022.
• "Wanda's Slowness: Enduring Insignificance,"  in Ivone Margulies & Jeremi Szaniawski, eds. On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 27-48.1