Erika is the Director of the UCHV Film Forum at Princeton University where she teaches critical film curation, environmental film studies, as well as architectonic and film rhetoric. She studied history, literature, and linguistics in Hungary, and comparative literature at Harvard University. She was a member of the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She was a co-founder, the first CEO and Academic Dean of Germany's first private English-language liberal arts college, known today as Bard College Berlin. In Princeton, she started the UCHV Film Forum and an extracurricular Research Film Studio dedicated to collective filmmaking based on student and faculty research. With a group of Princeton faculty, she launched the Local Spirit Initiative to act upon the increasing importance and opportunities of sensory learning and research through film and digital media. Her most recent project is a digital chrestomathy of cinematic iconography. Her aim as a researcher is to uncover art—especially the relatively new art of cinema—as a site of critical thinking in order to reform the trivium of liberal education for the age of electronic communication.

Erika joined THE NEW INSTITUTE in the summer of 2022.