Oleksandr Makhanets

Oleksandr Makhanets

historian, assistant project manager for the Urban Media Archive (2015 – 2019), head of the Urban Media Archive (2020 – 2022), chief archivist, researcher (2022 – present)


He received his Master's Degree at the Faculty of Humanities at the Ukrainian Catholic University (2014) where he presented his Master's thesis on "Historical Topography and Sociotopography of Ternopil in the second half of the 17th and the first quarter of the 18th century." In 2014-2015, he studied at Warsaw University.

Since 2015, he has worked at the Center for Urban History on the Urban Media Archive project, where he is in charge of developing and preserving visual and audio-visual collections. Curator of the [unarchiving] program promoting archival heritage through experimentation, non-academic forms and formats. Since 2016, he has coordinated an International Home Movie Day at the Center for Urban History in Lviv. In 2019, he started a research project on the history of amateur film practices in Ukraine in the second half of the 20th century that eventually resulted in the exhibition "Society with a Movie Camera."

The research interests include media history, digital archives, photography, cinema, amateur film practices, digital humanities, social history, and visual studies.