Marisa Olson

Assistant Professor of New Media
School of Film and Media Studies

Office: Natural Sciences Bldg., Room 1011
Tel: (914) 251-6649
Email: marisa.olson@purchase.edu

Personal Web site:
www.marisaolson.com

Marisa Olson's interdisciplinary work combines performance, video, net art, drawing, and installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture, and the aesthetics of failure. Her current projects revolve around forms of engagement and overlap between environmentalism, new age aesthetics, and upgrade culture. Olson is also a co-founder of Nasty Nets, the original "pro surfer" net art collective, and member of Project Blackbird, a comedy think tank initiated at Eyebeam. Her work extends beyond exhibitions and screenings into media theory, criticism, curation, activism, and other forms of collaboration and public address.

Education:
B.A., M.A., C.Phil., Rhetoric & Film Studies; University of California, Berkeley;
M.A., History of Consciousness; University of California, Santa Cruz.

Positions held:
Assistant Professor, ITP Program, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU (Adjunct)
Editor & Curator, Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY
Visiting Scholar, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Curator, Zero:One, the Art & Technology Network, CA
Associate Director, SF Camerawork, CA

Research Interests:
Media change and upgrade culture; environmentalism; the philosophy of science; spectatorship; humor; theories of form; hacktivism, tactical media, and other forms of technologically-mediated protest; film history and theory; queer theory and gender studies; remix, copyright, and open source culture; psychoanalytic semiotics.

Courses taught:
Video Performance
Experimental Web Practice
Representations of Technology (Western Civ)
Shooting & Editing Digital Video
Basic Visual Literacy
College Writing

Selected exhibitions:
52nd International Biennale di Venezia
Centre Pompidou-Paris
Whitney Museum of American Art
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Bard Center for Curatorial Studies/ Hessel Museum
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece
Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Germany
Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/ Montevideo, Netherlands
Berkeley Art Museum

Selected screenings:
Sundance Film Festival
British Film Institute
Pacific Film Archive
Images Festival, Toronto
New York Underground Film Festival
Mix Fest (New York and Sao Paolo)
Brakhage Festival, Boulder, CO

Selected publications:
Professor Olson was founding editor of the SFMOMA Media Arts zine, SMAC! and edited the Journal, Camerawork, from 2002-2004. She has been a regular contributor or Contributing Editor to Flash Art, ArtReview, Afterimage, Wired, Aspect, Art on Paper, Artweek, Rhizome, Planet, and Surface Magazine for several years. The following is a selection of recent feature works:

"Tools of My Trade," in TOOLS, ed. Kathy High, Sherry Hocking, and Mona Jimenez, MIT Press, forthcoming

"Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture" (chapter), Words Without Pictures, LA County Museum of Art, 2009

"The Early Videos of Terry Fox," in The History of West Coast Video Art, University of California Press, 2009

"From Bellevue Hospital to Videotape," ASDF's Wikipedia Reader, commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York and organized by David Senior at the Museum of Modern Art Library, 2009

"The Unreality Clause" (chapter), The New Normal, ICI, 2008

"We Are All Together" (chapter), PERFORMA Biennial catalogue, editor RoseLee Goldberg, 2005/2007

Recent lectures have also been published in the proceedings of the Inter-Society for Electronic Art (ISEA); Rencontres Internationales (Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid); NET.ART (Centro Cultural de España, Buenos Aires); the Society for Photographic Education; College Art Association; Re:Place Conference (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin); the Archiving the Avant-Garde Symposium (Berkeley Art Museum); the Sonic Interventions Conference (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis); CADRE Institute Invitational Lecture Series (San Jose State University); and the Association Internationale de Semiotique (IASS/AIS).

Selected curatorial projects:
Show & Tell, Guggenheim Museum
Defunct, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Montage: Unmonumental Online, New Museum of Contemporary Art (with Lauren Cornell)
Democracy Now, Parsons (with Karin Cuoni)
We Are All Together, Artists Space/ PERFORMA Biennial
Score: Action Drawing, White Columns
Pop Remix, SF Camerawork
Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR), ISEA Festival
All Systems Go, Scope Festival, NYC (as recipient of Cinemascope fellowship)
The Gif Show, Rx Gallery, San Francisco

Selected honors and awards:
Olson has recently been a Visiting Artist at Yale, Brown, Bard, NYU, Ox-Bow, Penn State, New School, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Mills College, Oberlin, Syracuse, Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), University of Iowa, University of New Mexico, University of Colorado-Boulder, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC).

She has received residencies, fellowships, and support in the form of commissions from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Experimental Television Center, Free103Point9, New Radio & Performing Arts, the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, the BNMI at Banff Centre for the Arts, Northwestern University, the Center for Humanities Research at UC Santa Cruz, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The University of California, Berkeley, awarded Olson a Haas Scholars fellowship, the Departmental Citation Award in Rhetoric, and the Rosalie M. Stern Fellowship.

Selected Affiliations:
International Advisory Committee Member, Ars Electronica Contributing Editor, Rhizome, New Museum of Contemporary Art Visiting Faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Bard College, NY Consultant, Creative Capital emerging fields fellowship program Nominator, Rockefeller Foundation/ Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellowships Advisory Council Appointee, Headlands Center for the Arts, CA Advisory Committee Member, Getty Research Institute/ California Arts Council Co-Founder, Nasty Nets internet surfing club Member, Project Blackbird Research Group, EYEBEAM, NY