Anna Kolesnikova earned her undergraduate diploma in Public Relations and German from Moscow State Linguistic University (Russia, 1998), her M.A. degree in German studies from the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, IA, 2005) and her Ph.D. degree in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA, 2011). She has been working in the Russian program at the University of Iowa since 2007 teaching a variety of language and culture courses. Her areas of expertise are Russian language and culture and technology in second language acquisition.  

In recent years, Anna also was the co-author and recipient of five federal grants with a total budget of approximately $355,000 for projects that aim at providing professional development to teachers of Russian in the U.S. As part of these grants, she served as Instructional Lead for Educational Technology, training teachers of Russian to integrate technology into their everyday teaching by creating interactive presentations, video tutorials, podcasts, online exercises and computer-based materials. Anna also organized study abroad programs for students and teachers of Russian, including such aspects as logistics, evaluations and reporting.