Barbara Maria Stafford (born 1941) is an art historian whose research focuses on the developments in imaging arts, optical sciences, and performance technologies since the Enlightenment.
Stafford is of European parentage and was born in Vienna, Austria. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was seven, first living in Fort Monroe, Virginia. However, her American stepfather's job as a military attaché caused the family to move every few years to postings in cities including Leghorn, Rome, Italy; Yokohama, Japan; Kilene, Texas; and Ft. Knox, Kentucky.
Stafford received her BA from Northwestern University, where she majored in continental philosophy and comparative literature. She spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, studying with Jean Wahl, Philippe Souriau, and Charles Dédéyan. She returned to Northwestern to study art history and got her MA. She went on to the University of Chicago for doctoral studies, and during this period she won a fellowship from the American Association of University Women that enabled her to study at the Warburg Institute in London. There she met art historian Ernst Gombrich, who became her thesis adviser.
Stafford began her teaching career as an assistant professor at the National College of Education in 1969. In 1972, she moved on to Loyola University Chicago and, a year later, to the University of Delaware, where she remained for nearly a decade. From 1981 to 2010, she was a full professor at the University of Chicago, where she was the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor until 2010. She is now emerita at the University of Chicago and has been teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology since 2010 as a Distinguished University Visiting professor.
Stafford's books closely examine modes and technologies of visual presentation from the early modern period up to today's digital media. She works at the intersection of the imaging arts, the optical sciences, and performance technologies, with a strong interest in how experience is embodied. Her recent essays examine the revolutionary ways in which the brain sciences are changing our view of the total sensorium and inflecting our fundamental assumptions concerning perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. Stafford's views have found an application in criticism of early mass media and multiple viewpoints, what she describes as "cross-referencing material bits of distant reality". [1]
Stafford co-curated an influential exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2001–02, "Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen." The exhibition catalog of the same title won the Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Book Prizes Current Exhibition Award in 2003.
Stafford holds honorary degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art (1996), Grand Valley State University, Michigan (1996), and the University of Warwick, England (1998). In addition to National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, she has won a number of prestigious awards for her research and books, including the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Clifford Prize (1980), the College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Award (1979), the Gottschalk Prize for the best book on an eighteenth-century topic published during the preceding year, for Body Criticism (1992), the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts for Echo Objects: the Cognitive Work of Images (2007), and the Thomas N. Bonner Award recognizing Echo Objects as "the best recent book in English on the theory and practice of the liberal arts."
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum,Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Amelia Jones, originally from Durham, North Carolina, is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her research specialisms include feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, and New York Dada. Jones's earliest work established her as a feminist scholar and curator, including through a pioneering exhibition and publication concerning the art of Judy Chicago; later, she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Jones has contributed significantly to the study of art and performance as a teacher, researcher, and activist.
Muriel Cooper was an American pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator. She was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications. She moved on to become founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. In 2007, a New York Times article called her "the design heroine you've probably never heard of".
Lorraine Jenifer Daston is an American historian of science. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and an authority on early modern Europe's scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.
György Kepes was a Hungarian-born painter, photographer, designer, educator, and art theorist. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. In 1967 he founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.
Anne Friedberg was an American author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Nada M. Shabout is an Iraqi-American art historian specializing in modern Iraqi art. She has been a professor of art history at the University of North Texas since 2002. She is the president and co-founding board member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art (AMCA) of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey.
Felice Frankel is an American researcher and photographer of scientific images. She has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complicated scientific information in images.
Eve Andree Laramee is an installation artist whose works explores four primary themes: legacy of the atomic age, history of science, environment and ecology, social conditions. Her interdisciplinary artworks operate at the confluence of art and science. Laramee currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the founder and director of ART/MEDIA for a Nuclear Free Future. Laramee is Professor Emerita of Art at Pace University.
Tiffany Holmes is an American new media artist and educator. She is based in Chicago, Illinois.
Anicka Yi is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of fragrance, cuisine, and science. She is known for installations that engage the senses, especially the sense of smell; and, for her collaborations with biologists and chemists. Yi lives and works in New York City.
Sonia Landy Sheridan, known as Sonia Sheridan, was an American artist, academic and researcher, who in 1969 founded the Generative Systems research program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was honorary editor of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). Sheridan had received awards from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation in 1973 for Photography and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Judith Barry is an American multimedia artist, writer and educator. Art critics regard her as a pioneer in performance art, video, electronic media and installation art who has contributed significantly to feminist theories of subjectivity and the exploration of public constructions of gender and identity. Her work draws on a diverse background, which includes studies in critical theory and cinema, dance, and training in architecture, design and computer graphics. Rather than employ a signature style, Barry combines multiple disciplines and mediums in immersive, research-based works whose common methodology calls into question technologies of representation and the spatial languages of film, urbanism and the art experience. Critic Kate Linker wrote, "Barry has examined the effects and ideological functions of images in and on society. Her installations and writings … have charted the transformation of representation by different 'machines' of image production, from the spatial ensembles of theater to computer and electronic technologies."
Suzanne Anker is an American visual artist and theorist. Considered a pioneer in Bio Art., she has been working on the relationship of art and the biological sciences for more than twenty five years. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about nature's 'tangled bank'." Anker frequently assembles with "pre-defined and found materials" botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens.
Carol Armstrong is an American professor, art historian, art critic, and photographer. Armstrong teaches and writes about 19th-century French art, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory and women and gender representation in visual culture.
Caroline A. Jones, is an American art historian, author, curator, and critic. She teaches and serves within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Michael SquireFBA is a British art historian and classicist. He became the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge in 2022. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.