Vivian Carol Sobchack is an American cinema and media theorist and cultural critic.
Sobchack's work on science fiction films and phenomenology of film is perhaps her most recognized. She is a prolific writer and has authored numerous books and articles across a diverse range of subjects; from historiography to film noir to work on documentary film, new media, and film feminism. Her work has been featured in such publications as Film Comment and Camera Obscura. She is the author and editor of many books on film and media.
Sobchack was born Vivian Finsmith in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, United States and grew up in Long Island.
Sobchack attended Barnard College. While at Barnard, Sobchack often frequented the nearby Thalia Theater, which offered up a diverse schedule of classic and foreign films. She received her degree in English Literature in 1961 with aspirations to write fiction. She published some poetry and began work on a novel, but within two years of graduating moved into a career counseling college grads in search of their first jobs. This led her to a new position, sponsored by President Johnson's Anti-Poverty Program, counseling troubled high school dropouts towards sustainable careers.
She remained in New York until 1966 when she relocated to Salt Lake City where her husband Thomas J. Sobchack had taken an Assistant Professorship in the English Department at the University of Utah. It was there that Sobchack got her first teaching experience. She took part-time work with the university, teaching film courses—some of the first offered in the early 1970s.
In 1992, she moved to the University of California, Los Angeles as a professor in the Critical Studies area of the UCLA Department of Film Television, and Digital Media and Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. She retired from administration and currently teaches classes in Visual Phenomenology, Contemporary Film Theory, Historiography, and Cultural Studies.
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded Sobchack the 2005 Distinguished Service Award and the 2012 Distinguished Career Achievement Award. She also won the 1995 Pilgrim Career Award for science fiction scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association. She has served as a juror on the American Film Institute Awards Motion Picture Committee five times since 2000. She is on numerous editorial and advisory boards for print and electronic publications—Film Quarterly, Cultural Theory and Technology, Signs, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Cinema Journal, to name a few. She has been an on-camera participant and voice-over commentator for several DVD features and featurettes. She can be seen delivering commentary, for example, on the bonus features of Dark City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer(Season 7) and Warner Bros. Tough Guys set of DVDs. She did a voice-over commentary on His Kind of Woman for Warner Bros. Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 3.
