Nilgün Bayraktar is a film and media studies scholar whose research and teaching focus on cinema, visual culture, migration, borders, mobility, and moving-image art. She is an associate professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts, where she teaches in film, visual studies, contemporary art, and graduate fine arts.
Bayraktar’s scholarship examines how cinema and moving-image practices engage questions of displacement, transnational mobility, memory, and border regimes. Her work brings together film theory, visual culture,...
Persis Berlekamp is an Associate Visiting Professor holding the Azarpay Distinguished Visitorship in the Arts of Iran and Central Asia. She is also Associate Professor Emerita of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, where she taught from 2005 to 2025. Her work explores how visual arts shaped cultural, social, and intellectual debates in the late medieval Islamic world (13th–15th centuries). The thirteenth-century Mongol Conquest serves as the recognized pivot between earlier and later periods of Islamic art, as several previously foreign visual motifs entered the...
C. Oliver O’Donnell is a historian of modern art and intellectual history with a particular focus on US-American traditions of modernity. He has taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Basel, and has held research appointments at the Warburg Institute and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. At Berkeley, he is a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project,...
As a Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, Matthew Vollgraff is a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project, sponsored by the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich. He is a historian of science, media, and visual culture, with a focus on modern Germany and its global entanglements. He has held research appointments and fellowships at eikones—Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel; the Warburg Institute, University of London; the University of...
