Disciplinary Interests: Literacy Studies
Anne Balsamo
Managing Director, The Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC, "Science Mobilized" w/Onomy Labs Inc. (Menlo Park): Installation for the Liberty Science Center on the public communication of science news
ANNE BALSAMO serves as the Director of Academic Programs of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. She is also a Full Professor of Interactive Media and Gender Studies. In addition to her academic positions, Anne has been a technologist and new media designer for more than a decade. In 2002, she co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Previously she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research group at Xerox PARC who created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She held the rank of Principle Scientist, and served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED's interactive museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. Prior to joining the research staff at PARC, Balsamo was an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she directed the graduate program in "Information Design and Technology.� Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her new book project, Designing Culture: A Work of the Technological Imagination examines the relationship between cultural theory, the design of new media, and the ethics of technology development.
