Emory University media scholar Gregory Zinman has been awarded $50,000 from the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant program to support his next book.
An acting associate professor in Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Film and Media, Zinman is among 27 writers selected by the Andy Warhol Foundation. The awardees received a collective $935,000 in support of articles, books and short-form pieces to bolster critical writing as a way to engage with the visual arts that address both general and specialized audiences.
The foundation selected Zinman for an Arts Writers Grant to support the research and writing of his book, “Public Scenes: Media Art Outside the Gallery and Museum.”
Zinman’s proposal says the book will move attention away from traditional art and media-making sources to queer and multiracial public spaces, using social histories while considering the care and preservation of moving-image works to explain how the notion of “public” is continuously changing.
“I’m grateful to the Warhol Foundation for providing me with the opportunity to show how innovative art-making has long been created and enjoyed in spaces outside of traditional art institutions, from nightclubs to malls, and from concert stages to virtual exhibitions online,” Zinman says.
“My hope is that treating those sites as subjects of scholarship can offer new perspectives on the meaning and significance of public art,” he adds.
Since September 2023, Zinman has been curator of Off The Wall @725 Ponce, a free public art series that projects films on the side of an eight-story office tower overlooking Atlanta’s Beltline Eastside Trail. He had previously programmed film and media art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image and several other museums and festivals.
Zinman is the author of “Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and Other Arts” and co-editor of “We Are Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik.” His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
This past fall, during his first semester at Emory, Zinman taught an introductory film course and a course on experimental cinema. This spring, he is teaching a course on artificial intelligence and film and is also curating the Emory Cinematheque film series centered around the topic.
Emory Cinematheque
The spring 2024 season of Emory Cinematheque — a series of free, professional film screenings offered by the Department of Film and Media and Emory College of Arts and Sciences — will focus on “A.I. and Film.” The series kicks off Wednesday, Jan. 24, with a showing of the 2001 Stephen Spielberg film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” that will be introduced by Provost Ravi Bellamkonda. Future screenings include “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “They Cloned Tyrone” and “Blade Runner.” All screenings are at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday nights in White Hall, Room 208.