Film and Visual Studies PhD Alumni:

Source: https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/phd-recipients Parent: https://afvs.fas.harvard.edu/academics

Carolyn Bailey

Proof of Life: The Biopolitics of Visual Media

Jessica Bardsley

Jessica Bardsley is Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is an artist and scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. Her films have screened across the U.S. and internationally at festivals like Sundance, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, RIDM, True/False, and on the Criterion Channel. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, among others. Her first feature film, The Cave Without a Name, was a finalist for the 2022 Venice Biennale's Cinema College. Her research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University, an M.A. and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A. from the New College of Florida.

Hannah Cohen

Hannah Cohen is a historian of modern and contemporary art and architecture, whose work broadly examines the construction of cultural and institutional value in modern and contemporary art. Her research is engaged in fields of art history, architectural history, museum studies, media studies, and the history of technology, with an overarching interest in the labor politics of cultural production. She is currently the Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan.

Dan D’Amore

Inside the Astrodome: The Senses of Environmental Management

Zachary Furste

Finding Media: Recordings from Elsewhere, 1936-1965

Sophie Gilmore

Algorithmic Hollywood: Data, Production, and the Cinematic Imagination 2008- Today

Jonathan Knapp

The Pre-Production of Space: Location Scouting and Location Management Practices in Postwar Cinema

Jungmin Lee

Jungmin Lee is a scholar of film and media with research interests ranging from contemporary cinema to the moving image in the visual arts. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University in 2018, and a B.A. with Honors from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media, and French Studies. She uniquely combines research with industry experience. Currently, she oversees the content distribution strategy at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Previously, she worked as a Strategy Lead at CJ Corporation, researching content programming and global media industry practices with a focus on transmedia. She has taught as a Visiting Professor at Yonsei University, and as a Lecturer at MIT and Harvard. She has also worked in the Curatorial Department at the Pompidou Center in France, the EYE Film Institute in the Netherlands, and the Harvard Art Museums. Jungmin is currently writing a manuscript based on her dissertation titled "Virtual Volumes: An Archaeology of Motion in the European Avant-Garde.” Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jungmin-lee-filmvisual

Xavier Nueno

Xavier Nueno Guitart (Barcelona, 1990) es un escritor e investigador en historia de los medios.

Es doctor en Estudios de Cine y Visuales por la Universidad de Harvard. Su campo de interés abarca la historia del conocimiento en sus diversas vertientes científicas, artísticas, sensoriales y tecnológicas. Desde 2023 es investigador en el Laboratorio de Historia y Teorías de la Arquitectura, la Tecnología y los Medios en la Escuela Politécnica Federal de Lausanne.

En su libro El arte del saber ligero. Una breve historia del exceso de información(Ediciones Siruela, 2023) investiga una tradición, menor y subversiva, que desde la antigüedad advierte sobre los peligros de quedar sepultado bajo los demasiados libros. Aquí́, los vanguardistas y los antimodernos sellan un pacto contrario al de Fausto. En lugar de entregar sus almas a cambio de un conocimiento ilimitado, exploran cómo poner un límite al deseo de saberlo todo. Este ensayo fue finalista del Premio de No-Ficción Vanity Fair Openbank (2024)

Ha publicado también Napa(s). Persistir en lo inacabado(Ediciones La Bahía, 2017) y Chaque Mercredi Caracas(Edition HS, 2020), una colección de imágenes que explora la relación entre el colonialismo y el turismo de masas con el que ganó el premio Les plus beaux livres suisses de l’année 2020.

Ha exhibido el cortometraje Cómo miramos(2021) en la Fundación Nobel, en Suecia, así como otros proyectos en el Centro Cultural de Arte La Moneda de Santiago de Chile, el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, el Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes de la Ciudad de México y la Feria del Libro de Arte de Los Ángeles.

Kyle Parry

Kyle Parry is Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author ofA Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes and co-editor of Ubiquity: Photography’s Multitudes.

Joana Pimenta

The Medium as Process: Moving Image in Contemporary Art

Kate Rennebohm

Kate Rennebohm is the Jill Beck Professor of Film and Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Lawrence University. Before her time at Lawrence, she completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Concordia University and was a Visiting Faculty member in Harvard’s Art, Film, and Visual Studies Department from 2018-2020. Her work broadly crosses film theory and philosophy, visual studies, media theory, and ethical and political philosophy, and her writing has been published in journals including Critical Inquiry, October, and Screen,as well as different edited collections. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled To Review: The Ethics and Politics of the Moving Image,which argues for “self-viewing” as both a structuring phenomenon of moving image media in the 20th century and one that introduced new frameworks of ethical thought and political praxis.

Emilio Vavarella

Emilio Vavarella received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2024. His dissertation, "Techniques and Technologies of Thought: A Short History of Media Models" offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between media and thought. He is Assistant Professor of Media and Film Studies at Skidmore College.

Through museum shows, film screenings, and written publications, Vavarella explores the relationship between life and technology and works at the forefront of experimental thought and praxis. His projects have been exhibited at the 18th Venice Biennale – International Architecture Exhibition (Italian Pavilion), MAXXI Museum (Rome), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), The Photographers’ Gallery (London), KANAL – Centre Pompidou (Brussels), MAMbo – Modern Art Museum (Bologna), Madre – Museum of Contemporary Art (Napoli), Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb), Museu de Ciències Naturals (Barcelona), National Museum of Fine Arts (Santiago), Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad), MBAL – Musée des beaux-arts du Locle, National Art Center (Tokyo), Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (New York), Off – Biennale (Cairo), BJCEM – Mediterranean Biennale, and Kyiv Biennial, among others. His films have screened at Toronto’s Images Festival; Torino Film Festival, Jeu de Paume (Paris), HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and at various media art festivals including EMAF – European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media (Stuttgart), and JMAF – Japan Media Arts Festival (Tokyo).

Vavarella is the 2022-‘24 artist in residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a 2023 Harvard Horizons Scholar. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, art prizes and grants, including a prestigious Italian Council award (2019). His most recent artist book, rs548049170_1_69869_TT (Mousse Publishing), brings together fifteen thinkers and practitioners from the fields of art, philosophy, bioengineering, media theory, and the history of science and technology.

Becca Voelcker

Dr Becca Voelcker lectures in art and film history at Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in anticolonial and ecofeminist representations of land since the 1970s. Becca earned her PhD in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University in 2021. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, is forthcoming with University of California Press. The book is a cross-cultural history of eco-political cinema based in ten locations including Wales, where Becca grew up, and Japan, where she lived as a young adult. Alongside research, Becca writes for Sight & Sound, introduces films at the British Film Institute, and serves on film festival juries. In 2024 Becca was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. She regularly speaks about arts and culture on BBC Radio. www.beccavoelcker.com

Andre Uhl

Andre Uhl ’21 is a scholar of digital culture with primary expertise in the aesthetics and governance of Artificial Intelligence and critical posthumanist thought. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches AI Literacy across the Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Harris School of Public Policy. Translating his background in the arts and contemporary critical theory into tech policy, he supports grassroots innovation communities worldwide. Recent research projects include a macro-discourse analysis on the intersubjectivity of AI governance strategies, and the development of a standard for the implementation of autonomous and intelligent systems within the practice of Earth Law. website: www.andreuhl.com

Devin Wangert

Suspended Declension: Automation and Economies of Exhaustion

Devin Wangert has accepted an assistant professorship at the School of Advanced Studies in Tyumen, where he and his partner, Xindi Li, will build and head a media studies program.

T. Brandon Evans

Brandon’s dissertation project, “Listening to the Infinite: Sikh Soundscapes, Media, and Audiovisions,” looked at the auditory dimension of Sikh media, and at varied uses of audiovisual media and heritage curation in the contemporary Sikh tradition in sites such as gurdwaras, museums/public exhibitions, and cinema. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art and of Literary and Cultural Studies at Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Thapar Institute, Patiala, India, where he teaches courses in media studies and art practice.

Mingyi Yu

Scripting: Deep Histories of Computing, Graphics, and Media

Nathan Roberts

Reforming the Common Boundary: An Ethic of Technical Media