Dr Malgorzata Bugaj is a teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Open Learning. She convenes and teaches short open-access courses, such as Cinema and the Five Senses, Avant-garde Cinema of 1920s, Women Directors in Focus or Auteurs of Polish Cinema.
Her current research lies at the intersection of medical humanities and film studies, with a focus on ageing and neurodegenerative disease. She is particularly interested in the ethical dimensions of film representations of (health)care. Malgorzata is co-editor of an upcoming volume "Dementia in Film, Media and Culture: Towards Ethically Responsible Discourse" mapping the crossover of the medical ethics with the ethics of cultural representation (EUP, publication planned for the beginning 2026) and co-lead of NECS (European Network for Film and Media Studies) workgroup Ageing, Lifecourse and Media .
Malgorzata completed her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh with a thesis titled “Visceral Material: Cinematic Bodies on Screen”, which compared the perception of the human body across arts, humanities and medicine. Graduating from the Medical Humanities programme the University of Durham (2024), allowed her to combine the background in film studies with a focused exploration of cinema in relation to healthcare. Within academia, she has been involved in initiatives merging film studies and medical humanities, including co-organising healthcare and film symposia (such as “Dementia in Film, Media and Culture symposium” or “Medfest”), delivering invited lectures for academic programmes combining exploration of film and medicine, and presenting conference papers on moving image and neurodegenerative disease. Beyond the academic context, she has led or contributed to a number of public engagement projects, including video installations on brain health, programmes raising awareness of healthy ageing among younger audiences and mentoring initiatives employing film to support mental healthcare (part of Our Minds scholarship).