Film and Visual Studies PhD Recipients
Harvard’s PhD program in Film and Visual Studies has a strong record of job placement. In recent years, graduates from the Film and Visual Studies PhD program at Harvard have accepted tenure track positions, visiting professor positions, postdoctoral fellowships and industry positions at major colleges, universities and companies in the United States and abroad. Our graduates have been placed in positions in the following departments at the following institutions:
AI Software Development, AI Singapore
Art and Literary and Cultural Studies, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology Patiala
Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University
Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cinema and Media Studies, Wellsley College
Council on Library and Information Resources Digital Library Federation (CLIR/DLF) Postdoctoral Fellowships, Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
Department of Art History and Architectural Studies, Connecticut College
Department of Art History, UMass Amherst
Film and Television, New York University (NYU)
Film Department, Emerson College
Film Studies Center, Harvard University
Film Studies, Lawrence University
Fine Art Goldsmiths University of London
Department of History of Art, University of Michigan
Gender and Visual Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California at Santa Cruz
Institution on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago
Media and Film Studies, Skidmore College
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Humanities in a Digital World, University of Southern California
Mello Postdoctoral Fellow, World Cinema, Williams College
New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Concordia University
Postdoctoral Researcher, History and Theories of Architecture, Technology and Media, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen
Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation, Carnegie Mellon University
Strategy Manager, Entertainment and Media, Sony Pictures
University of California Santa Barbara
Media Studies, Humboldt-Universität
Yonsei University
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
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.
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 whose research interests range from experimental cinema to the moving image in the visual arts. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Yonsei University. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University in 2018 and a B.A. with Honors in Modern Culture and Media and French Studies from Brown University. She uniquely combines scholarly research with industry experience, having worked on global content distribution strategy at Sony Pictures Entertainment and CJ Corporation. She has previously taught film theory and modern art history at MIT and Harvard. She has also worked in the Curatorial Department at the Centre Pompidou in France, the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, and the Harvard Art Museums.
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 author Ways of Seeing After Dark (2026) and A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes (2023), and co-editor of Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes (2021).
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. Prior to 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 for two years. 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 working on a book manuscript titled To Review: The Ethics and Politics of the Moving Self-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. She is a faculty leader for the prestigious Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium and is currently Secretary of the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada.
Nathan Roberts
Reforming the Common Boundary: An Ethic of Technical Media
Pauline Shongov
Visual Media Archaeologies: On the Ruins and Remont of Modernity and its Afterlife
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
Lecturer, School of Art, Goldsmiths University of London
Dr Becca Voelcker writes on art, film, and visual culture. She earned her PhD at Harvard University in 2021 and is currently a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2024 Becca was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, is a cross-cultural history of eco-political cinema, published by the University of California Press in 2026. The book launched alongside a BBC Radio programme and a curated film season at the Barbican Centre in London.
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.
Mingyi Yu
Scripting: Deep Histories of Computing, Graphics, and Media
Nace Zavrl
Justified Images: Committed Documentary after Yugoslavia
Shaowen Zhang
Engineers of the New Chromatic World