Robert von Dassanowsky FRHistS, FRSA (b. January 28, 1965, New York City) is an Austrian-American academic, writer, film and cultural historian, and producer. He is usually known as Robert Dassanowsky.
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A student of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a graduate of UCLA, where he has also served as Visiting Professor of German, Dassanowsky is a widely published academican, award-winning playwright and has written for television.
Since 1993, he has been Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and has become particularly known for his influential scholarly work on author Alexander Lernet-Holenia, German filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl,[1] and on Austrian and Central European film.
Dassanowsky served as founding president of the Colorado chapter of PEN and is a founding Vice President of the Austrian American Film Association (AAFA). Additionally, he is the Contributing Editor of the Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, a Contributing Advisor to the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Cultures, and is author of Austrian Cinema: A History (2005), the first English language survey of this national cinema. Among his other publications is a collection of essays on New Austrian Film edited with Oliver C. Speck (2011), edited collections on Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play Der Schwierige (Iudicium 2011), Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Manipulations of Metafilm (Continuum 2012), and on World Film Locations: Vienna (Intellect 2012). He is currently authoring the study Screening Transcendence: Film Under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933-1938.[2]. Dassanowsky also serves on several editorial boards of literary publications in the U.S., Canada and Austria. His Telegrams from the Metropole: Selected Poems 1980-1998 received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2000. His poetry book, Soft Mayhem, was published in 2010 (Poetry Salzburg).
The son of Austrian-American pioneering film studio founder and musician, Elfi von Dassanowsky, he is also active as an independent producer and head of the Los Angeles/Vienna based Belvedere Film production company. His recent projects include the documentary Felix Austria! aka The Archduke and Herbert Hinkel (2011), the short The Retreat (2010), the feature film Wilson Chance (2005), the animated short The Nightmare Stumbles Past (2003), and the award-winning Semmelweis (2001). In 2007, British tabloids briefly reported that he may have been involved with a Heather Mills biopic project on her life with Paul McCartney, but Dassanowsky has not commented.[3] He served as associate producer of Dog Eat Dog (2011) a comedy short with Zachary Quinto directed by Sian Heder and is currently (2011-12) co-producing Never Kissed by the Queen: The Black Countess from Bain Street, a documentary feature on the marriage of Martha Solomons, the daughter of a freed slave and Harry, The 8th Earl of Stamford written and co-directed by South African filmmaker Maggie Follett.[4]
Dassanowsky is a member of Mensa (U.S.A.) and the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George (Spanish branch). He was named the Carnegie Foundation/CASE U.S. Professor of the Year for Colorado in 2004,[5] and decorated by the Austrian president in 2005.[6] Dassanowsky received the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award in 2001 and the Chancellor's Award in 2006. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2007 [7] and of the Royal Society of Arts in 2010. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2001, he was appointed to serve as one of the three U.S. delegates to the Academy in 2009.[8] He was elected Vice President of the Austrian Studies Association (formerly the Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association) in March 2011.
Since 2008, Dassanowsky has been the director of the Elfi von Dassanowsky Foundation, established in memory of his mother.[9]. In addition to various other grants, the Foundation sponsored the first Elfi von Dassanowsky Prize for work by female filmmakers which was presented to Norwegian artist Inger Lise Hansen for Parallax (2009) at the Vienna Independent Shorts Film Festival in June 2010.