How I was a Designer: Vladimir Paperny in Conversation with Sasha Razor
How I was a Designer: Vladimir Paperny in Conversation with Sasha Razor
UMD Libraries
Monday, October 27, 2025 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm McKeldin Library, Special Events Room 6137The Maya Brin Residency Program and UMD Libraries are pleased to host Vladimir Paperny, an author, designer, architectural historian, and faculty member of the Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Paperny will discuss his forthcoming book, How I Was a Designer (Kak ia byl dizainerom, NLO, 2025), a book the author compares to Mark Twain’s classic sketch, “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper”: when Vladimir Paperny became a designer, he knew approximately as much about design as Mark Twain’s hero knew about agriculture. The book tells the story of American and Soviet design through the personal experiences of the author, and is illustrated with abundant examples, including many of his own designs. As the literary critic Marietta Chudakova once wrote, “Paperny knows how to write seriously about the comic and comically about the serious.”
Please join us for an evening with Paperny in conversation with scholar and cultural critic Sasha
Razor (University of California, Santa Barbara).
Sasha Razor is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies and Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2020 with a dissertation on screenwriting and leftist cultural movements in Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Her research spans archival praxis, media archaeology, and migration studies, with a focus on Russian, Soviet, and East European film histories. She is the founding director of the
Russophone Los Angeles Research Collective and is currently co-editing two volumes on Belarusian visual culture and cinema. In addition to her academic work, Razor writes cultural journalism for the Los Angeles Review of Books and contributes to public scholarship through curatorial projects and civic initiatives.
