Maria Yatskova, (’05) who earned her BA in Liberal Arts from The New School for General Studies had her documentary, Miss GULAG screened on January 19, 2009, on the Documentary Channel.

Miss GULAG, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, follows three female prisoners in a Siberian prison preparing to compete in a beauty pageant. Through the pageant, a complex narrative emerges about the lives of the first generation of women to come of age in post-Soviet Russia. Miss GULAG explores the individual destinies of three women: Yulia, Tatiana, and Natasha, all bound together by long prison sentences and circumstances that have made them the vigilantes of their own destinies.

Maria Yatskova was born in Moscow in 1976 and immigrated to the United States with her mother and grandmother five years later. Maria's engagement with Russian history began with her feature essay for the Associated Press surrounding the controversial remains of Russia's last Czar, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times. More recently, her article about prison camp UF 91/9 in Siberia, titled "Crime and Beauty," appeared in the September 2006 issue of Marie-Claire magazine. The piece provided part of the vision behind her directorial debut, Miss GULAG.