Hanna Rose Shell is Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for the Media Arts, as well as Associate Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. 听She is jointly appointed in both the Department of Art and 听Art History, and the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts. Shell is also a core faculty member of the Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science, and a faculty affiliate of the Department of History, the Center of the American West, and the Program in Intermedia, Writing, and Performance [IAWP] in the College of Media, Communication and Information.
Shell鈥檚 scholarly work occupies the interdisciplinary areas of Art and Media History and Criticism, Cinema Studies, and the History of Science and Technology. She is also a creative practitioner and documentary film maker, with a particular focus on textiles, photography, and the interconnections among visual, material, and scientific cultures.听听Shell鈥檚 latest book, released in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press, is called听Shoddy From Devil's Dust to the Renaissance of Rags.听It examines recycled textiles as transformative media, providing an innovative and interdisciplinary material history of used clothing and dovetails with a series of experimental documentary shorts and a textile installation in the Czech Republic on the subject of waste, recycling and old clothes. Shell鈥檚 previous book听Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, published by Zone Books in 2012, has inspired her own and other multimedia works around the world. Shell has published widely in scholarly and popular journals on subjects including taxidermy, waste processing, and the history of chronophotography. She founded, and served as commissioning editor for, the "Beyond Words" section of the journal听Technology and Culture, and co-edited听DigitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies听(Princeton University Press, 2019). Her articles appears in听Journal of Visual Culture,听Technology and Culture,听Configurations,听History and Technology,听Bidoun,听Technology and Culture, and听Cabinet, among other outlets. 听Her films and media works have appeared worldwide, at art and film venues including The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Machine Project, Slamdance, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Machine Project, the Zimmerli Art Museum.听