Biography
Talia Shabtay is a historian of Modern and Contemporary Art. Her interests include the history of collaborations across art, design, engineering, and science; Cold War visual culture; history of design pedagogy; and technologies of vision.
Her current book project explores how and why the image of science became central to a mid-twentieth-century popular aesthetic inextricable from conceptions of self and society. Based on new archival findings, the book illuminates the contributions of artists and designers to educational reform projects of the Sputnik Era, industrial films, exhibitions, commercial advertising, and artist books.
Her courses invite students to consider the cultural implications of visual media within the history of science and technology, as well as social and environmental history. Recent seminars include “Art and Technology from the Historical Avant Gardes to the Algorithmic Present,” “Art and the Environment,” and “Photography and the Making of Modern Art and Science.”
Shabtay received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. Her work has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.
