Holly Willis

I am a writer and scholar. I began my career by integrating a love of radical feminist film and video practices with critical writing. While earning my PhD, I co-founded Filmmaker Magazine; I then became the editor of RES magazine and co-curator of the traveling digital media showcase RESFEST. In 2007, I returned to academia to direct the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. There, I helped build a program situated at the intersection of new forms of cinematic expression and critical making. I currently serve as the chair of this program, titled Media Arts + Practice. In my own practice, I continue to write about art and design, often focusing on film, video and new media, as well as post-cinema as the moving image experience becomes a designed interaction within physical space. While my writing has tended to take the form of arts journalism or cultural criticism, I am inspired by the hybrid critical/creative work of Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil and Jenny Boully, among others, who are reimagining criticality through a poetics that is political, materialist and frankly exhilarating. I have published several experimental essays and I teach a graduate seminar titled Creative Critical Writing, which is designed specifically as a space within which to experiment with writing about, near or in relation to art and design.