ABOUT LORI
Lori Landay, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary teacher, scholar, and artist whose creative and critical work explores themes of transformation in audiovisual cultural forms, technology, and perception.
Lori plays with theoretical ideas in creative work, using humor and often surprising tactics to question the relationships between the virtual and the actual in our rapidly transforming world. During 2022-23, Lori will be on sabbatical, pursuing the moving target of the latest developments in new media and emerging technologies by completing a project entitled Moving Realities, a 3D interactive audiovisual experience for Web 3.0 that explores connections between motion and emotion.
During her 2022-23 sabbatical, Lori is pursuing the experimental project Moving Realities: Motion and Emotion in Immersive Environments as a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Dr. Landay is the author of two books, I Love Lucy (TV Milestones Series) and Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture, as well as numerous publications on topics including Minecraft, LEGO, virtual worlds, virtual subjectivity, digital narrative, silent film, and gender and comedy. Her expertise in the cultural history of gender, comedy, and media in American culture has resulted in her appearance in documentaries including Finding Lucy (American Masters, PBS) and recently, The Girl in the Show, premiering at the New York Independent Film Festival May 10, 2018. She has given talks at conferences including VRDC at GDC, SCMS, UFVA, and MLA, events like Boston’s HubWeek and CyberFest, organizations including Linden Lab and MIT Open Doc Lab, and served as a judge at the MIT Media Lab’s Reality Virtually Hackathon.
Her creative work includes virtual art, interactive installation, animation, creative documentary, digital video, and music video. Works have been chosen for the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, Cyberfest (St. Petersburg, Russia), On the Wall Dance Film Series (Berlin, Germany), and Utopics Swiss Sculpture Exhibition (Biel/Bienne, Switzerland), and won awards such as Best of Show and People's Choice Awards, New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference Art Show; Best Machinimatography Award, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference SIGVE Group; First Prize, University of Western Australia 3D Art Challenge; and the Mejor Obra De Investigación/Open This End Award of Excellence for Investigative Film. Her interactive new media art installation “ShadowLoop” was included in the AVATARS Exhibit at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, April-May 2019 during Open Studios.
She is a Board Member of The Public VR Lab/Brookline Interactive Group, a founding member and Steering Committee Member of Women in the Next Realities, part of the Berklee Feminist Faculty Alliance, and an active member of Boston VR.
In the Fall 2018 semester, she was the first professor to teach a course to a group of online and onsite students that met some of the time in the virtual world AltSpaceVR, and is working with Power Station/BerkleeNYC on 360 degree video and other XR projects. As the Vice-Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Brookline Interactive Group/Public VR Lab, the leading community media organization in the country to advocate for public access to VR and AR, and a founding member of Women in the Next Realities, she connects Berklee students with the wider communities.
As Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music, Boston, she directs the interdisciplinary minor in Visual Culture and New Media and contributes to curriculum and programming for Berklee Game and Interactive Media Scoring. Lori's focus is on XR, an umbrella term for extending reality through emerging technologies including virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, motion capture, AI, automation, and in her model of the “new realities,” social mediations of reality. She teaches courses including “Digital Narrative Theory and Practice,” “The Language of Film,” “Art and Virtual Reality,” “Dream Machine," and in the Dance Division at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, “Dance + Technology Lab” and "Dance on Film and Video."
