Photo: Derek Conrad Murray
Soraya Murray is a scholar and critic of contemporary art, with particular interest in new media, theory and criticism, and globalization in the arts. Her writings have been published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Flash Art, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is also a regular contributor to the international contemporary art journal ExitEXPRESS (Spain). Murray holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and recently received an MA and PhD in art history at Cornell University. She began teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Fall 2007.
Contact: semurray@ucsc.edu
Murray's scholarship seeks to unearth the ways that a global phenomenon of electronic mass media and communications technologies shapes human interactions and interpenetrates contemporary experience. How do race, nation, class, gender and access affect who may share in this experience? How do the technologies that we have fashioned, in turn refashion us? Further, her research is focused on how art and technology intersect, how cultural production responds to its influential presence, and how artists have utilized new media forms to express their visions. In her analysis of photography, film, video, electronics and the digital, Murray seeks to illuminate these technological expressions within the social, theoretical and historical contexts from which they arise.
“Conversation with the Artist: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons,” co-authored with Derek Conrad Murray in Salah M. Hassan and Cheryl Finley, eds., Diaspora Memory Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (New York: Prestel, 2008), 244-248.
“Conversation with Pamela Z,” co-authored with Derek Conrad Murray in Salah M. Hassan and Cheryl Finley, eds., Diaspora Memory Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (New York: Prestel, 2008), 302-309.
“Cybernated Aesthetics: Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 88 Vol. 30, No. 1 (May 2008).
“On Art and Contamination: Performing Authenticity in Global Art Practices,” Co-authored with Derek Conrad Murray, in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 22/23 (Spring/Summer 2008): 88-93.
MFA Exhibition Production, Spring 2009
Activist Art Since the 60s: Focus on Collectivism and Technology, Winter 2009
Video Games as Visual Culture, Winter 2009
Time-Based Media and The Body, 1980 to the Present, Fall 2008
Histories of Early Video Art in the U.S., Spring 2008
Issues and Artists, Winter 2008
Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, Winter 2008
Introduction to Issues in Digital Art, Fall 2007
Media History and Theory, Fall 2007
Recent Methods and Approaches to Digital Media, Fall 2007
Introduction to Art and Technology, Fall 2006-Spring 2007
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