School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-50 of 56 Results
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Morehshin Allahyari
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
BioMorehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری), is an Iranian-Kurdish artist, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
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Terry Berlier
Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Music
Bio“Terry Berlier makes conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials.”—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
I am an Associate Professor of Art and an interdisciplinary artist teaching classes primarily in sculpture. I acknowledge that Stanford University occupies the unceded lands of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, and honor the ancestral and ongoing relationships between the Muwekma Ohlone and these territories. I acknowledge that I am a settler on these lands with an obligation to humility; gratitude; and contributions to Indigenous rematriation and sovereignty, wellness and well-being, and the collective struggle against colonization and oppression.
Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. This results in sculptures that are kinetic and sound based, and multi-media installations. She emphasizes the essential roles played by history, cultural memories, and environmental conditions in the creation of our identities. Using humor, she provides tools for recovering and reanimating our faltering connections with self, queerness, nature, and society. Interweaving movement, sound, and interaction as a metaphor for both harmonious and dissonant interactions, Berlier acts as an archaeologist excavating material objects to challenge our understanding of progress and reveal how history is constructed within a cultural landscape.
Recent exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, Southern Exposure, Contemporary Art and Spirits in Osaka Japan, Arnoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center, Weston Art Gallery, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany.
She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where she has taught since 2007. -
Patricia Blessing
Associate Professor of Art & Art History
BioPatricia Blessing is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Blessing is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Elizabeth Dospel Williams and Eiren Shea, she co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 for the Cambridge Elements series Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Blessing’s work has been supported by the ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Cultures, the Barakat Trust, the British Academy, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians.
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Scott Bukatman
Professor of Art and Art History
BioScott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman has been published in abundant journals and anthologies, including October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, Science Fiction Studies, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins shows how our engagement with Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics also a highly aestheticized encounter with the medium of comics and the materiality of the book. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader’s imagination to inhabit. His most recent book, Black Panther, part of the 21st Century Film Essentials series (University of Texas Press), explores aspects of the 2018 Ryan Coogler film, including the history of Black superheroes, Black Panther's black body, the Wakandan dream, and the controversies around the Killmonger character. -
Enrique Chagoya
Professor of Art and Art History
BioDrawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy.
Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. His father, a bank employee by day and artist by night, encouraged his interest in art by teaching Chagoya color theory and how to sketch at a very early age. As a young adult, Chagoya enrolled in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he studied political economy and contributed political cartoons to union newsletters. He relocated to Veracruz and directed a team focused on rural-development projects, a time he describes as “an incredible growing experience…[that] made me form strong views on what was happening outside in the world.” This growing political awareness would later surface in Chagoya’s art. At age 26, Chagoya moved to Berkeley, California and began working as a free-lance illustrator and graphic designer. Disheartened by what he considered to be the narrow political scope of economics programs in local colleges, Chagoya turned his interests to art. He enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a BFA in printmaking in 1984. He then pursued his MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1987. He moved to San Francisco in 1995. He has been exhibitng his work nationally and internationally for over two decades with a major retrospective organized by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa in 2007 that traveled to UC Berkelye Art Museum and to the Palms Spring Art Museum in 2008 ( fully illustrated bilingual catalog was published). In the Fall of 2013, a major survey of his work opened at Centro Museum ARTIUM, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital city of the Basque Country, near Bilbao, Spain (with a trilingual catalog documenting the exhibition). The exhibition will travel to the CAAM in the Canary Islands in 2015.
He is currently Full Professor at Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History and his work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others. He has been recipient of numerous awards such as two NEA artists fellowships, one more from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, residencies at Giverny and Cite Internationale des Arts in France, and a Tiffany fellowship to mention a few.
He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, George Adams Gallery in New York, and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. His prints are published by Shark’s Ink in Lyons, Co, Electric Works in San Francisco, CA, Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA, ULAE Bay Shore, NY, Segura Publishing in Pueblo, AZ, Trillium press in Brisbaine, CA, Made in California in Oakland, CA, and Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto, CA. -
Nathan Cordova
Lecturer
BioNathan Cordova is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with photography, video, sound, sculpture and performance. He received his MFA in Photography, Video and Imaging from the University of Arizona (‘24). Nathan has received grants and fellowships such as the Medici Scholar Award, Helen Gross Award, Mellon-Fronteridades Fellowship, GPSC Travel Grant as well as a fully-funded residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. He’s independently published four artist books and his commissioned work has appeared in WIRED. Nathan’s current project, Ghosts and Shadows, is an audio/video artwork that aims to uncover a common auditory and visual language between humans and the US/Mexico Border as immaterial/material-entity. He is a member of Southwest Photo Collaborative, whose group show, Land, Body & Archive, visited the cities of Phoenix, Albuquerque and Tucson in 2023-2024. Nathan spoke as a student-presenter at the Society for Photographic Education’s Annual Conference, New Realities, in St. Louis, MO in the spring of 2024. He was named to the 2024 Lenscratch Student Prize Top 25 Photographers to watch.
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Paul DeMarinis
Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Music
BioPaul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. One of the first artists to use computers in performance, he has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d'Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been exhibited at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. He has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2006. Much of his recent work deals with the areas of overlap between human communication and technology. Major installations include "The Edison Effect" which uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers, "Gray Matter" which uses the interaction of flesh and electricity to make music, "The Messenger" that examines the myths of electricity in communication and recent works such as "RainDance" and "Firebirds" that use fire and water to create the sounds of music and language. Public artworks include large scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the Olympics in Atlanta and at Expo in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium and at Xerox PARC and is currently a Professor of Art at Stanford University in California.
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Shane Denson
Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication
BioShane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of three books: Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). He is also co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016).
See also shanedenson.com for more info. -
Usha Iyer
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsFilm studies, South Asia, Caribbean, Gender, Diaspora, Race and ethnicity
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Srdan Keca
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
BioSrdan Keca's films A LETTER TO DAD, MIRAGE and ESCAPE screened at leading documentary film festivals, including IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Jihlava IDFF and Full Frame, while his video installations have been exhibited at venues like the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Whitechapel Gallery.
The found-footage film FLOTEL EUROPA, produced and edited by Keca, premiered at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, winning the Tagesspiegel Jury Prize. His upcoming feature documentary MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION (in postproduction) centers around a community living inside the remnants of one of the most ambitious, and never completed, architectural projects of socialist Yugoslavia. It is supported by the Sundance Documentary Film Fund, the MEDIA Fund of the European Commission, and Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, among others. His upcoming film THAT SOUND HIGH IN THE AIR (in development) explores climate change and migration. It was pitched at CPH:FORUM in 2020.
Keca is a graduate of the Ateliers Varan and the UK National Film and Television School (NFTS). Since 2015 he has worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, teaching in the MFA Documentary Film Program. -
Jan Krawitz
Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita
BioJan Krawitz is a Professor Emerita in the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film and Video. She has been independently producing documentary films for many years. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals in the United States and abroad, including Sundance, the New York Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Edinburgh, SilverDocs, London, Sydney, Full Frame, South by Southwest and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her most recent film, Perfect Strangers, is a documentary that follows Ellie, a woman who embarks on an unpredictable, four-year journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys. The film was broadcast on the national PBS series, America ReFramed. Krawitz’s previous documentary, Big Enough, was broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. and internationally in eighteen countries. Her films, Mirror Mirror, In Harm’s Way, Little People, and Drive-in Blues were all broadcast on national PBS and her short film Styx is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Little People was nominated for a national Emmy Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Krawitz has had one-woman retrospectives of her films at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Rice Media Center, the Austin Film Society, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is the recipient of artist residencies at Yaddo and the Bogliasco Foundation. Krawitz is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Graz in Austria.
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Marci Kwon
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
BioMarci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the Cantor Art Center's Asian American Art Initiative. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton, 2021), and co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné. She is the recipient of Stanford’s Asian American Teaching Prize, CCSRE Teaching Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Women's Faculty Forum Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, and the Mellon Foundation Emerging Faculty Leader award.
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Pavle Levi
Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts
BioPavle Levi is Associate Professor in the Art Department's Film and Media Studies Program.
He is also Faculty Director of Stanford's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).
Prof. Levi's primary areas of research and teaching include: European cinema (emphasis on Eastern Europe), aesthetics and ideology, film and media theory, experimental cinema, intersections of theory and practice.
He is the recipient of the 2011 Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. -
Emanuele Lugli
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
BioEmanuele Lugli is an art historian who specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian painting, urban culture, trade, and fashion. His theoretical concerns include questions of scale and labor, the history of technology, and the reach of intellectual networks.
An expert in the history of measurements, Emanuele has written a trilogy on the topic. The first book, Unità di Misura: Breve Storia del Metro in Italia (Il Mulino, 2014), reconstructs the revolution triggered by the introduction of the metric system in nineteenth-century Italy. The second, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness (University of Chicago Press, 2019), searches for the foundations of objectivity through an examination of how measurement standards were created, displayed, and envisioned by medieval communities. The third, Measuring in the Renaissance: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2023), highlights measurement as a pervasive creative activity, which erases information as much as it generates it.
Emanuele has also written a study on hair and the bodily minuscule in shaping concepts of beauty and desire in Renaissance Florence, titled Knots of the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence (University of Chicago Press, 2023). He co-edited a collection of essays on the role of size in art making, titled To Scale, with Professor Joan J. Kee of the University of Michigan (Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell: 2015). Currently, he is working on books about the idea of "love at first sight" and Italian painter Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614).
In addition to his academic research projects, Emanuele regularly writes for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Slate, Il Sole 24 Ore, Domani, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. -
Michael Marrinan
Professor of Art and Art History, Emeritus
BioAreas of Specialization:
European Art - 17th through 19th Centuries -
Jody Maxmin
Associate Professor of Art and Art History and of Classics
BioProf. Maxmin's research includes Greek painting and sculpture, archaic Greek Art, the Art and Culture of 5th century Athens, classical influence on later art, athletics in ancient Greece.
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Jamie Meltzer
Professor of Art and Art History
BioProfessor Jamie Meltzer teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film. His feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. Shifted Landscapes, a documentary feature in production, presents a mosaic of stories depicting the environmental, cultural, and psychological landscapes of California amidst the ongoing climate crisis. His short documentary, not even for a moment do things stand still, premiered at SXSW in March 2022, winning a Special Jury Mention in Visual Reflection. The film provides an observational glimpse into a COVID-19 art installation, dropping into intimate moments of people honoring their loved ones, and interrogating the role of mourning and closure during an unfolding tragedy. It was published as a New York Times Op-Doc in April 2022. Huntsville Station, a short documentary film directed with Chris Filippone, was featured as a New York Times Op-Docs and premiered at Berlinale and SXSW in 2020. The film observes the scene at a bus station - where dozens of inmates just released on parole take in their first moments of freedom before taking the bus home. True Conviction (broadcast on Independent Lens in May 2018), a co-production of ITVS and the recipient of a Sundance Institute grant and a MacArthur grant, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Mention in the Best Documentary Feature category. Informant (2012), about a revolutionary activist turned FBI informant, was released in theaters in the US and Canada in Fall 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith. Previous films include: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broadcast, 2007), an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction.
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Richard Meyer
Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History
BioAreas of Specialization:
20th-century American art and visual culture -
Alexander Nemerov
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of English
BioA distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. Revered for his breadth of scholarship and celebrated for his eloquent public speaking, Nemerov inspires audiences with his belief in the affirming and transfiguring force of art.
An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. His conjuring of a lost world of shade and sun has been praised by Annie Proulx ("deeply beautiful”, “astonishingly tender”, “one of the richest books ever to come my way") and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”).
Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor, was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine, was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov’s initial books include Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus; The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824; and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.
Nemerov, an engaging, eloquent speaker, gave the 2007 Andrew Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2017, he delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, becoming the first scholar to deliver them with a focus on American art. He has also published two exhibition catalogues: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, the companion to a National Museum of American Art exhibition of that name and Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic.
After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors. -
Miguel Novelo Cruz
Lecturer
BioExperimental media artist, filmmaker, and cultural arts programmer who graduated in 2013 from the Escuela Universitaria de Artes TAI in Madrid, and recently graduated from San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA degree in Film and minor in Art and Technology (2018).
In this past years Miguel has exhibited pieces and short films in cities such as Paris (La Jeune Martyre - Mex-Parismental 2015) , Mexico city (Mención Honorífica en el concurso universitario nacional 2015 - PRMR) , Tijuana (Concurso Nacional de Video Experimental 2014-2016 - Dualidad - PRMR - Telémocion 2), Madrid ( Dualidad -VIDEOTALENTOS, 2014), Morelia, (La Marea - FICM, 2018) San Francisco (ON LOC, Marchantes 2018) and many more. -
Bissera Pentcheva
Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Classics
BioBissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics, phenomenology, and acoustics. Her most recent book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press 2017) explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. She has also edited, Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics and Ritual (Ashgate, 2017). Pentcheva has published another two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships among them: J. S Guggenheim, American Academy of Rome, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of Classical Arabic, Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Onassis Foundation (Greece), Dumbarton Oaks, and Columbia University's Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship. Her work has been published at the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Convivium.
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Barna Szász
Lecturer
Casual Employee, Inclusion, Belonging and Intergroup Communication
Casual employee, Inclusion, Belonging and Intergroup CommunicationBioBarna Szász is a Budapest-born filmmaker & XR storyteller. He moved to the U.S. in 2017 on a Fulbright and graduated from Stanford University’s MFA Documentary Film program in 2019.
Barna believes that important stories told well can make a great impact. This is why beyond story and dramaturgy he's also an enthusiastic explorer of forms old and new: besides documentary films, his Instagram is loaded with 35mm analog photos, and his recent works include location-based interactive AR/MR experiences, and live VR works as well as 360 documentaries. By thinking openly about form, his goal is to find emotion-driven, impactful stories and present them in a form that best suits them. Using a collaborative approach, Barna works together with communities to amplify their voices so he can best represent them, and brings on experts ranging from psychologists to historians to optimize impact and maximize accuracy.
His documentary work was acquired by PBS’s POV Shorts and the Guardian, Staff-Picked at Vimeo, and screened at DOC NYC, DOK Leipzig, CPH:DOX, Big Sky, Frameline, Outfest, and other festivals. His video journalism work has been viewed by more than 1M viewers and has been shared by more than 100K. As an XR creator, he has been selected for the world’s leading XR workshops and forums such as the NewImages XR Market and the European Creators’ Lab. As a CPH:LAB fellow he’s developed Kvöldvaka, a multi-sensory AR documentary that aims to redefine our relationship with nature, in the era of climate change, and If These Streets Could Talk, a location-based interactive Mixed Reality experience that corrects the historically distorted media representation of the Holocaust.
Before moving to the U.S., Barna earned a BA in Motion Picture at his country's main film school, the University of Film and Theatre Arts, Budapest. Then he worked as a video journalist and later as Head of Video at Index.hu, Hungary’s equivalent of the New York Times. As a lecturer he has taught Video Journalism at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Currently, he lectures on XR storytelling at Stanford University. -
Nancy de Wit
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art, Emerita
BioNancy J. Troy is Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art and Chair of the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University. In addition to The De Stijl Environment (MIT Press, 1983), she is the author of Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (Yale University Press, 1991), Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion(MIT Press, 2003), and, most recently, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian(University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this book about Mondrian after his death in 1944, Troy examines the trajectories of the artist's work and legacy as they circulated through the realms of elite and popular culture, and she explores the ways in which the dominant historical narrative of Mondrian and his work has been shaped by art-market forces.
Professor Troy received her PhD from Yale University in 1979, and thereafter taught at The Johns Hopkins University (1979-83), Northwestern University (1983-93), and the University of Southern California (1994-2010). A past president of the National Committee for the History of Art, she was Editor-in-Chief of the flagship art history journal, The Art Bulletin, from 1994 to 1997. She has been awarded many fellowships, most notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
At Stanford, Professor Troy teaches courses on modern European and American art, architecture and design; cubism; modern art and fashion; art, business and the law; the art market, and topics generated by the collections and exhibitions of the Cantor Arts Center and the Art and Architecture Library. -
Frederick Turner
Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Art and Art History and of History
BioFred Turner’s research and teaching focus on media technology and cultural change. He is especially interested in the ways that emerging media have helped shape American life since World War II.
Turner is the author of three books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries. They are available here: fredturner.stanford.edu/essays/.
Turner’s research has received a number of academic awards and has been featured in publications ranging from Science and the New York Times to Ten Zen Monkeys. It has also been translated into French, Spanish, German, Polish and Chinese.
Turner is also the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also worked as a freelance journalist for ten years, writing for the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, the Boston Phoenix, and the Pacific News Service.
Turner earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. He has also earned a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia University. -
Camille Utterback
Associate Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Computer Science
BioCamille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including The Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; ZERO1 The Art & Technology Network, San Jose, CA; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Utterback’s work is in private and public collections including Hewlett Packard, Itaú Cultural Institute in São Paolo, Brazil, and La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain.
Awards and honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002) and a commission from the Whitney Museum for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website (2002). Utterback holds a US patent for a video tracking system she developed while working as a research fellow at New York University (2004). Her work has been featured in The New York Times (2010, 2009, 2003, 2002, 2001), Art in America (October, 2004), Wired Magazine (February 2004), ARTnews (2001) and many other publications. It is also included in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art – Digital Art book (2003) by Christiane Paul.
Recent public commissions include works for the Liberty Mutual Group, the FOR-SITE Foundation, The Sacramento Airport, The City of San Jose, California, The City of Fontana, California, and the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Other commissions include projects for The American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, The Manhattan Children’s Museum, Herman Miller, Shiseido Cosmetics, and other private corporations.
Utterback is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. She holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.
