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Gerald O'Grady

Researcher in Residence (2002)

Early History of Electronic and Digital Art in New York State

Gerald O'Grady, Ph.D., will continue his work on the Steina and Woody Vasulka fonds, which were added to the Foundation's collection in 2000 and are kept at the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D). In exploring these archives, Dr. O'Grady will focus on a research project tentatively titled Early History of Electronic and Digital Art in New York State, which places the Vasulkas' work in its proper historical context.

As an academic, Dr. O'Grady was actively involved in the early years of electronic art, founding several departments of media studies, particularly at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The faculty at SUNY Buffalo included such eminent artists as the Vasulkas, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Peter Weibel and James Blue. Dr. O'Grady has taught at several U.S. universities, including New York, Columbia and the New School for Social Research. Most recently, he was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and a member of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, where he conducted research on the films of the Civil Rights Movement. Now retired, Dr. O'Grady was recently the first guest professor (Gastwissenschaftler) invited by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he gave a series of lectures on the work of Marshall McLuhan, on whom he is writing a book.

Since 1979, Dr. O'Grady has edited, independently published and contributed essays to over 30 catalogues for film retrospectives or series including The Films of the Civil Rights; Remembering Malcom X; and Czech Filmaking, 1963-1990 for Joseph Papp's The Public Theater; on the Brazilian filmmaker Nelson Pereiros dos Santos for the Film Society of the Lincoln Center; on Theo Angelopoulos for the Museum of Modern Art in New York; on Dziga Vertov for the Collective for Living Cinema (NY); on Dusan Mizoguchi for the Cinématheque Ontario (Toronto); on David MacDougall for Media Study/Buffalo; and Articulate Energy: The Emergence of the Abstract Film in America for Harvard University and Anthropology Film Archives.

© 2002 FDL