MARTHA GEVER

Associate Professor. MFA in photography and video, State University of New York, Buffalo (Visual Studies Workshop); PhD in sociology, City University of New York.. Video, popular culture, media studies, social theory, writing and research for MFA students.
Gever’s critical writing deals mainly with the intersections between visual culture and social relations, and takes the form of studies of video and television, other types of popular culture, gender, and sexuality, as well as reviews of work in video, photography, and new media. She is the author of Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Self-Invention (Routledge, 2003), as well as a co-editor of Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Routledge, 1993), How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (Bay Press, 1991), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (MIT Press, 1990). For a number of years Gever was the editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly; prior to that she was associate editor of Afterimage. She has published critical work in a variety of publications, including Art Journal, Art in America, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Discourse, GLQ, the Nation, October, Screen, and White Walls, in addition to Afterimage and the Independent. And she contributed chapters on video to various anthologies: Mary Lucier (Melinda Barlow, ed.); La vidéo, entre art et communication (Nathalie Magnan, ed.); Modern Arts Criticism (Lawrence Trudeau, ed.); Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (Sally Jo Fifer and Doug Hall, ed.); AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Douglas Crimp, ed.); Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser, ed.); Cultures in Contention (Diane Neumaier and Douglas Kahn, ed.); and Transmissions: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetic (Peter D’Agostino, ed.). She also wrote an essay on the film projections of Steve McQueen published in the catalogue for Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery in London and contributed to a number of catalogues for lesbian and gay film festivals, among them the Stichting International Gay and Lesbian Filmfestival in Amsterdam . She co-curated, with Bill Horrigan, an exhibition of independent video and film work at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York City, held in conjunction with a conference and collection of papers that resulted, all entitled How Do I Look?. She also spearheaded an ad hoc group that organized Viewpoints: A Conference on Women, Culture and Public Media, at Hunter College. Gever has received a number of grants and awards, including the College Art Association’s College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism and a fellowship in critical writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with her work as a critic, editor, and teacher, Gever has been involved in political advocacy for the arts and artists, contributing to the campaign to establish a fund for independent video and filmmakers at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Independent Television Service, as well as organizing and lobbying against censorship and cuts in public funding.

links:
Entertaining Lesbians