SHORT CV

Aras Ozgun is a film and media scholar whose academic interests lie in new media and film theory, cultural studies, and visual ethnography, and a media artist whose creative practice extends over experimental and documentary filmmaking, photography, video installation and interactive media.

Aras has been interested in experimental media production and media theory since his undergraduate education in Political Science at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. After completing his B.A. in 1994, he earned his M.S. degree from METU in Sociology with a thesis on the theory of televisual communication. He moved to New York in 1998 to pursue a second masters degree at the Media Studies Department of the New School University, which offered him the chance to combine his two main fields of interest: media theory and practical video/filmmaking. He earned his M.A. in 2001, with a thesis on Deleuzean theory of electronic visual media. He then continued to pursue a Ph.D. in the Media Studies program of the New School for Social Research's Sociology Department, and completed his Ph.D. dissertation, The Political Economy of Contemporary Cultural and Artistic Production: A Comparative Study of New York, Berlin and Vienna in January 2011.

Between 2001 and 2014, he taught graduate and undergraduate course at New School, CUNY and New York University in New York, American University in Dubai and University of Sharjah in UAE, and conducted seminars and workshops in Bruxelles, Vienna, Istanbul, Ankara, Belgrade, Cyprus, Cairo, and Yerevan.

In addition to his academic work, he has directed and produced many artistic, documentary, experimental, and educational media projects that were published and exhibited internationally, and he has collaborated with other artists and scholars for a number of international productions and performances. He has also published articles on issues relating to media, popular culture, social theory, politics, and urbanism for various scholarly journals including ArtMargins, Rethinking Marxism,Marketing Globalization and Development Review, Doxa, Springerin, Kültür ve İletişim, Toplum ve Bilim, and Birikim.

He is currently teaching media theory and digital media related courses at the Media Studies graduate program of The New School University as well as chairing Cinema and Digital Media Department at IEU.