King's College London - Homepage

Educated in Australia. Ph.D. and B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Melbourne.

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa (Intensive Graduate Course, 2008)

Previously Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Queensland.

• International Avant-garde Cinema
• Screen Aesthetics and Spectatorship
• Film and Philosophy
• Institutional History of Experimental Film and Media

Books (Monographs)

Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Books (Edited Collections)

Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 

SCMS Honorable Mention for the Best Edited Collection for 2012.

Refereed Journal Artices

"Avant-garde Re-enactment: World Mirror Cinema, Decasia, and The Heart of the World", Cinema Journal  49, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1-19.

“Special Effects in Martin Arnold’s and Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinema of Mind,”Discourse  28, nos. 2-3 (Spring 2006): 28-50.

“Amateurism and Experiment: the BFI's Experimental Film Fund (1952-66),”The Moving Image  5, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 67-94.

“No longer state-of-the-art: Crafting a Future for CGI,” Wide Angle 21, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 28-47.

“CGI Effects in Hollywood Science Fiction Cinema 1989-1995: The Wonder Years,” Screen  40, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 158-176.

“Welcome to Basementwood: Computer Generated Special Effects and Wired magazine,” Postmodern Culture 8, no. 3 (May 1998). 

Book Chapters

"Ken Jacobs: A Half Century of Cinema," in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1-24.

“Jacobs’s Bergsonism,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 196-212.

“A Production Designer's Cinema: Historical Authenticity in Popular Films Set in the Past,” Spectacle and the Real, ed. Geoff King (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 145-155.

“Public Image,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (ZKM: Center for Art and Media and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 168-175.

Research

Michele Pierson’s research interests are in the areas of avant-garde cinema; film and philosophy (especially aesthetics); film and the other arts; the institutional history of experimental film; and film and new media. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Accessibility of the Avant-garde: Drama and Abstraction in American Experimental Film and Media.

Teaching

Specialist undergraduate and graduate teaching on American Underground Cinema, Experimental Film and Philosophy, and Film and New Media.
 
Current PhD supervision on found footage film and media, experimental animation, and the CG animated feature film.
 

Research Supervision

Avant-garde and Experimental Film; American Underground and Independent Cinema; Film and New Media; Contemporary Hollywood Cinema; Media Aesthetics and philosophy. Currently supervising PhD dissertations on found footage media; the computer animated feature film; and experimental animation.

Current Students

Christopher Holliday

Lilly Husbands

James Whitfield

International Advisory Board of Mirage: A Journal of Artists’ Moving Image and Editorial Board of “Thinking Cinema” Series for Continuum.