Dina Iordanova (born 1960) is an educationalist and Professor of Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. A specialist in world cinema, her special expertise is in the cinema of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Europe in general. Her research approaches cinema on a meta-national level and focuses on the dynamics of transnational film; she has special interest in issues related to cinema at the periphery and in alternative historiography. She has published extensively on international and transnational film art and film industry, and convenes research networks on film festivals and on the Dynamics of World Cinema, with funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Born in an intellectual family in communist Bulgaria, she read Philosophy and German and obtained her Doctorate under the guidance of Prof. Isaac Passy in Aesthetics and cultural history at Kliment Okhridski University in Sofia, in 1986. She worked at the Institute for Cultural Studies before emigrating to Canada in 1990. In emigration Iordanova lived and worked in Canada and the USA, later on settling in the UK in 1998 and becoming actively engaged in European networks and projects.
Prior to her arrival at St. Andrews, she held positions at the Radio-TV-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin, a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Leicester in England. Her work is reviewed widely, translated in over fifteen languages and adopted for use in courses at over seventy Universities internationally. She has been a guest professor at the University of Chicago, and served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Queen Mary, University of London.