leila christine nadir

Leila Nadir is Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College and earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 2009. She works as a trans-disciplinary scholar, new media artist, and creative writer, traversing the fields of trans-American literature, critical/cultural theory, theories of modernity/modernism, and media studies. Since 2005, she has been collaborating with artist Cary Peppermint under the name ecoarttech: together Cary and Leila explore the convergence of biological, cultural, and digital networks, imagining what it means to be an ecological being amidst globally networked environments. In spring 2012, Furtherfield interviewed Cary and Leila about the relationships of environment, media, technology in their work: http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-leila-nadir-and-cary-peppermint-ecoarttech. Recent works include “Indeterminate Hikes” (2011/2012), a smartphone app and installation that transforms chance encounters in everyday locales into public performances of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings, created originally for the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP exhibition; “Untitled Landscape #5,” an internet-based work commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which visualizes the digital footprint left by visitors to the Museum’s online information environment; “Center for Wildness in the Everyday” (2010), a series of networked performances about the “wildness” of water in the Texas Trinity River Basin, commissioned by the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design; and “Eclipse” (2009), a net art work exploring the politics of pollution, the myth of wilderness, and the surplus of online information, commissioned by Turbulence.org of New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc. other honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts artist fellowship and teaching positions at Banff New Media Institute and Anderson Arts Ranch. In addition to ecoarttech, Leila regularly reviews exhibitions and books related to art, technology, environment, and science. Many of her reviews can be found at Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/author/leila-nadir/. Her current projects also include writing a memoir about growing up in an Afghan immigrant community in rural Central New York during the Cold War and revising her doctoral dissertation into a book intertwining ecological theories of modernity, media, art, and literature.For more information, please visit http://www.ecoarttech.net/. You can also follow Leila's work with and beyond ecoarttech by joining https://www.facebook.com/ecoarttech or following ecoarttech's Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/#!/ecoarttech.