Thank you for visiting my website. I am an art historian, media scholar, writer, and educator. My work looks at the intersection of contemporary art and media, nature, the nonhuman, and technology. I teach Art History at the College of Marin, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I am a PhD candidate in the Visual Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
I write, Nature in the Arts, a quarterly column for Bay Nature magazine. My short-form writing has also appeared in Art Practical, Artsy, Daily Serving, the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, KQED, Mubi.com, Oakland Standard (Oakland Museum of California), Open Space (SFMOMA), Sculpture Nature, SF Weekly, Variable West, and Wilder Quarterly. You can find much of that writing on this website. In Fall 2022, my essay on the work of Ana Mendieta was published in Text Maters. In Spring 2022, my essay on Amanda Strong’s film Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) was published in Feminist Media Histories. My chapter on the Great Auk for the anthology becoming—Feral: A Book of Beasts can be viewed here. I have presented my work at the annual and biennial conferences of the College Art Association; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts; the North American Society for Social Philosophy; and the European Association for American Studies.
In addition to my writing, with my wife, artist Kristen Brown, I co-directed Modoc, a documentary film about the Modoc War and its legacy. Modoc was fiscally sponsored by the San Francisco Film Society and supported by the Puffin Foundation. You can watch or download the film here.
Please feel free to contact me at mhtedford@gmail.com