Jessica Pisano is Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. She has been an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her monographs Staging Democracy (NIU-Cornell University Press, 2022) and the prize-winning The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village (Cambridge UP, 2008) are based on her long-term research in rural communities along Ukraine's borders with Russia and the EU. She is a trustee of the Kharkiv Karazin University Foundation in Ukraine. Her work has appeared in Politico and The Washington Post. She is currently writing a book about a single street in Eastern Europe under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy.