Eszter’s experiences as a first-generation immigrant born in Hungary and raised in the United States inform her scholarly and curatorial practice. Her writing on topics such as refugee selfies, humanitarian immersive media, and migrant documentaries is published in leading academic journals, including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), Feminist Media Studies, and Transnational Cinemas, among others.

Her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Unsettled Media: Documenting Refugees and Europe’s Shifting Borders along the Balkan Route, examines contemporary non-fiction media about Europe’s so-called “migrant crisis” to demonstrate how multiple migrant/refugee communities, government institutions, journalists, artists, and activists use media to unsettle post-Cold War Europe’s material and conceptual borders.

Eszter is currently Senior Research Manager at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, where she previously held a postdoctoral fellowship. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California in 2021.