Mayeri Promoted to Full Professor

The Harvey Mudd College Board of Trustees has approved the recommendation of the Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure Committee and President Maria Klawe that Associate Professor of Media Studies Rachel Mayeri be promoted to full professor.

Mayeri teaches courses in humanities, art and media studies that help promote critical thinking and creative expression. In her fall course, Contemporary Topics in Art, Science, and Technology, she challenged students to produce maps and artifacts for a futuristic island of California. Their experimental cartography and speculative anthropology document food, language, infrastructure and geography. The class’ exhibit, “Life After the Great Separation: California as an Island,” is on display through Oct. 29 in the North Gallery of Honnold/Mudd Library.

Mayeri’s teaching and artwork situate media at the center of culture and politics and serve as a conduit for personal expression. As an artist, she often makes videos about the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal.

For several years, Mayeri has been exploring the primate continuum and has created experimental videos titled Primate Cinema. Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst, the project received financial support from a Wellcome Trust Arts Award as well as the Arts Council England, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Aix-Marseille University and a research grant from Harvey Mudd. Her film Primate Cinema: Apes as Family was selected for the Sundance and Berlinale film festivals as well as Ars Electronica and Abandon Normal Devices contemporary art festivals.

Recently, she was invited to Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt during its Ape Culture show to participate as a juror and artist in Synapse Curatorial Network—a workshop for curators on bridging art and science—specifically on the topic of human-animal relations. In 2016, Mayeri will have a shows at Art Laboratory Berlin on non-human subjectivities and in Australia on women/art/science.

As guest curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mayeri contributed to an exhibit on the history of special effects, Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater Mechanics. She also produced the video Stories From the Genome, which placed contemporary gene science within a history of speculative theories of reproduction. Mayeri has distributed her work along with many other videos by artists and scientists as a touring DVD video show and website titled Soft Science.

Mayeri received a bachelor of arts degree in media/culture from Brown University and master of fine arts in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego.