Alexander H Kershaw
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Biography:
PhD 2020
I am a visual artist, scholar, and educator born and raised in Sydney, Australia. These pursuits engage an interdisciplinary research that connects photographic/film practice and theory with other fields invested in the polemics of intersubjective and multi-species encounters, such as ethnography, material culture and performance studies. After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons.) at the University of New South Wales, Art and Design in 2000, I began my career as a photographer. My work was shown at the Australian Centre for Photography, Heide Museum of Modern Art, The National Portrait Gallery, and featured in Anne Marsh’s survey book on contemporary Australian photography since 1980. In 2007, I returned to academia to complete my Master of Fine Arts degree. There I developed my practice through long-term, fieldwork-based research projects resulting in large scale, collaborative video/sound installations. In 2009, a survey of my video work was held at London’s Beaconsfield Gallery and The Phi Ta Khon Project was selected for the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany. Screenings and exhibitions of my work were also held at venues including Tokyo Wondersite, Japan, Jeu de Paume, France, Matucana 100, Chile, and The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. In 2012, after finishing a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, I began my PhD in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. Through my written dissertation, Camera Cults: Technosocial Theatres of the Photographic Event, and service as a member of the editorial collective, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art, I have been working towards contributing to the field of photographic theory and socially engaged art. Simultaneously, I am working on a feature-length documentary film on hunting in the Northeastern United States. As an educator, my career began in Australia after finishing my undergraduate studies. I designed and taught studio courses in photography and video at some of Sydney’s most prestigious art schools. While at UCSD, I developed the breath of my qualifications by teaching art history and theory and most recently the course, Camerawork and Cultures of Persuasion, that I developed for the Muir College Writing Program.
