About Virginia Kuhn

Virginia Kuhn is a Professor in the Media Arts + Practice division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Her work centers on visual and digital rhetoric, feminist theory and algorithmic research methods. Kuhn's research projects include the VAT (video analysis tableau), which applies computational methods to the study of vast filmic archives, and The Library Machine, a gesture-based visual interface for searching library collections. She has published (with Vicki Callahan) a collection titled Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press, 2016) and has edited three peer-reviewed digital collections: The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing (The Cine-Files, 2016) with Vicki Callahan; MoMLA: From Panel to Gallery (Kairos, 2013) and From Gallery to Webtext: A Multimodal Anthology (Kairos, 2008) with Victor Vitanza. In 2005, Kuhn successfully defended one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Committed to helping shape open source tools for scholarship, she also published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar titled "Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate," (IJLM, 2010) and she serves on the editorial boards of several peer reviewed digital and print-based journals. Kuhn was the 2009 recipient of the USC Provost's award for Teaching with Technology. She directs the undergraduate Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, as well as the graduate certificate in Digital Media and Culture, and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in new media, all of which marry theory and practice.