Bernadette Wegenstein

Bernadette received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Vienna University in 1998 with a dissertation on the representation of AIDS in the media and the Act Up movement. She studied semiotics at the Università degli studi di Bologna under Umberto Eco, and medical anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. As a post-doc in 1999 she moved to the United States to study comparative literature and film at Stanford University, and has been living in the United States ever since. She is a Research Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also directs the Center for Advanced Media Studies. Bernadette produced and directed her first documentary Made Over in America (Icarusfilms) about the television makeover show The Swan in 2007. Her second film, See You Soon Again, which she co-directed with the Austrian director and producer Lukas Stepanik (The Cinema Guild, 2012) is a portrait of Viennese Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz in his efforts to pass on his story of survival to the Baltimore youth. She has directed two feature documentaries: The Good Breast, a feature documentary that interweaves the intimate stories of three breast cancer patients with the history and mythology of the breast. The film brings together her expertise on the history of the body and makeover culture with her passion for the character-driven cinéma vérité genre; and the documentary short, Devoti tutti, a neo-realist exploration of the little known breast cancer Saint Agatha who was martyrized by her breast sacrifice in 251 AD. The film is an immersion into the devotional culture around the yearly celebration of Saint Agatha in Catania, Sicily.