Janine Marchessault

Director of the Visible City Project + Archive, which is examining new practices of media art in a variety of urban contexts. She is also a co-investigator on the Future Cinema Lab, Faculty of Fine Arts at York University. Funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Future Cinema Lab is a state-of-the-art digital media research facility devoted to ‘new stories for new screens.’

As Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, Dr. Marchessault is investigating how the information society is redefining the artist’s role and shaping urban contexts. Inherent in her work is the development of new research methods that use advanced media technologies to interpret the cultural ecologies of cities, with the ultimate goal of proposing new planning and policy strategies.

Currently, Professor Marchessault is researching the cultural and political practices of artists in urban contexts and new forms of translocal citizenship in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. Another research focus is the culture of suburbs. She was recently awarded a SSHRC grant to develop a case study of Willowdale, Ontario, with an interdisciplinary group of artists.

Dr. Marchessault has two book projects in progress. Ecstatic Worlds: 20th Century Utopian Film Projects examines collective experiments with film and media that have been driven by aspirations for universality. Urban Mediations: Art, Ethnography and Material Culture, an interdisciplinary collection that she is co-editing, situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies.

Dr. Marchessault is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005) and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000); and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999). She is a founding editor of the arts journal Public Art/Ideas/ Culture and a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada.