Anne-Marie Oliver

Founding Executive Co-Director

Anne-Marie Oliver is a cultural theorist, photographer, journalist, and documentarian, whose projects occur at the intersection of art, religion, politics, and technology. Her work can be found in Le Monde diplomatique, Critical Inquiry, Salon, Partisan Review, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, The New Republic, and Public Culture, the Bulletin of the Center for Transnational Cultural Studies, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, among others.

She spent many years doing fieldwork and research in the Middle East, collecting and documenting the art, political ephemera, and underground media of the first intifada—work supported by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation and, later, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the results of which were published by Oxford University Press in 2004 as The Road to Martyrs’ Square (with Paul F. Steinberg). She has given lectures at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, University of Chicago, UCLA, UCSB, California Institute of the Arts, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, LA Public Library, Annenberg School for Communication at USC, University of the Arts London, and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs; and has appeared as a discussant on CNN, NPR, BBC, MSNBC, Air America, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She has carried out various projects, individual and collective, at PICA's TBA Festival, PDX Contemporary Art, and galleryHOMELAND, and has served as a guest critic at CalArts; WSU; University of Oregon; the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; University of the Arts London, and the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers. 

In 2013, she curated the show Infinity Device with Barry Sanders at the Historic Maddox Building in Portland, Oregon. Most recently, she contributed the entry on art for Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox, an encyclopaedia of “thinkthings” (Denkdinge) based on the philosophy of the Czech media theorist Vilém Flusser. She has taught at MIT, Georgia Tech, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and co-founded and chaired the MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she taught for a decade in the Department of Intermedia, the MFA in Visual Studies Program, and the MFA in Applied Craft and Design Program