Lisa Cartwright
Professor Emeritus
efcartwright@gmail.com
Biography
Working across visual culture studies and feminist science and technology studies, Lisa Cartwright is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts, Communication, Science Studies, and the Program in Environmental Research with affiliation to the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. An alumnx of the Whitney Independent Study Program and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale and has taught or served as a fellow or visiting scholar at schools including the University of Rochester, Ruhr University, Cornell, the University of Chicago, Brown, and, most recently, the SINTA PhD Program at the University of Bern and the Bern Academy of the Arts. Her books include Visualizing Oceanography, Practices of Looking, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, The Visible Woman, and Moral Spectatorship. She is a founding member of the International Association of Visual Culture and the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. With Nan Renner of the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, she led Embodied Pacific, a five-year project on art practice and oceanography for the Getty Foundation's PST Art's 2024 Art + Science Collide initiative. Her current research is devoted to the publication phase of two edited collections from this project (Visualizing Oceanography, out with Bloomsbury in late 2025, and Seaways, on Pacific navigation and Indigenous vessel design); continued work on a manuscript about the history of feminist sci-art practice with co-authors Merete Lie and Nora Vaage; and an art research and Substack project documenting the geopolitical transformation of national power infrastructures in American landscapes, with a focus on wind, nuclear, and data site development.
Embodied Pacific Project (2020-2025): https://www.graphicocean.org
Some publications: https://ucsd.academia.edu/LisaCartwright