Olga White (PhD student, Media Studies) received her bachelor’s degree in Radio & Television Production and her master’s degree in Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts (BECA) from San Francisco State University. As a master’s student, Olga earned both the Stuart Hyde Graduate Award in Writing About the Media and the Michelle Wolf Graduate Teaching Award. Prior to starting at CU Boulder, Olga held a faculty position at both San Francisco State University in the BECA department and at San Jose State University in the Department of Film and Theatre where she taught courses in media literacy, digital humanities, writing for the media, media research, and film scholarship as a lecturer.
Olga’s prior research was on the representation of Russian speakers in U.S. Media and her master’s thesis was a content analysis of news footage of the Boston Marathon Bombing and proceeding events. In fall of 2020, Olga presented a content analysis of Russian-speaking characters in Season Three of Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” at the International Conference on Communication and Media Studies.
Currently, Olga is pursuing research in media and technology convergence, social media algorithms as a media distribution and mediation system, and hegemonic messages in meme culture. Olga presented ongoing research into meme culture and meme tropes at the International Conference on Communication and Media Studies in the fall of 2022 and 2023.
In addition to her academic and research pursuits, Olga worked in production on multiple television programs including America’s Best Dance Crew and NBC’s The Sing Off.