Lisa M Zaher

B.A. English-Modern Studies, University of Virginia (1997); M.A. Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art (2001); Ph.D. Art History, University of Chicago (2013).

“The Historicity of Form: Challenges Posed by Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic,” Open Set (October 2015). “Episodes of Failure?: Or, some remarks on the institutional history of photography and its relevance to a genealogy of visuelle Kultur,” in James Elkins, Gustav Frank and Sunil Manghani, eds., Farewell to Visual Studies (Stone Art Theory Institute Series, Volume 5). University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2015. “Goldfield Studies,” with Dawn Roe and Leigh-Ann Pahapill, Photographies 6:2 (2013). “Re-framing Photographic Subjectivity: Hollis Frampton’s The Secret World of Frank Stella,” Shifter. Volume 17: Re-__-ing (2011), republished in Rethinking Marxism 23:2 (2011). Co-editor, Chicago Art Journal: Volume 16: Immediacy/Mediacy (2006).

Catalogue Essays/Reviews

“Andre’s Drill: Carl Andre at Dia:Beacon,” Exhibition review, Open Set (January 2015). “Dawn Roe’s Goldfields: Leigh-Ann Pahapill and Lisa Zaher in Conversation,” Exhibition catalogue, Dawn Roe: Goldfields. Melbourne, Australia: Screen Space, 2012. “Objectif imaginaire: Picture and Place in Leigh-Ann Pahapill’s Reconstructions,” Exhibition catalogue, Leigh-Ann Pahapill: Likewise, as technical experts, but not (at all) by way of culture. Winter Park, Florida: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, 2012. “Hanging Between: Matthew Metzger’s Double Back,” Exhibition essay, Matthew Metzger: Double Back. Berlin, Germany: Arratia, Beer, 2011. “Leigh-Ann Pahapill: “Seeing, of course, is also an [Art],”” University of Chicago Department of Visual Arts MFA Brochure, April 2007.

Invited Talks

“Picasso at the Gates of Death: Sex, War and Modernism,” Moving Images in Art Symposium, University of Chicago. December 2015. “New Media and the Radical Aspiration,” School of Art, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington. January 2014. “Performing an Image: Hollis Frampton’s Inframedia Practice,” Visuality, Culture, Performance Colloquium, Illinois State University, Normal. October 2013. “Dawn Roe, Leigh-Ann Pahapill and Lisa Zaher in Conversation,” The White Box, University of Oregon, Portland. February 2013. Symposium Panelist: “Leigh-Ann Pahapill: Likewise, as technical experts, but not (at all) by way of culture,” Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. January 2012.

Curatorial/Programming

Patrick Clancy’s peliculas, Chicago Cultural Center. March 22–25, 2017. Frames of Resistance: Vostell and Friends in 16mm, University of Chicago. February 3, 2017. Reading Fluxus Film, Black Cinema House at Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago. January 20, 2017. Drive-In Happening, University of Chicago. October 14, 2016. Procession of Concrete Traffic, with Michael Christiano, Smart Museum of Art. Chicago. September 30, 2016.

Lisa Zaher is an art historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture whose research and teaching focus on the history and theory of photographic media (construed broadly to include still and moving images, along with proto-cinematic devices, video and new digital platforms for distribution and display), historiography, and the conservation of fine art and media. She has been a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2011 and recently completed a position as the first UChicago Arts Conservation Research Fellow for work on Christine Mehring's project to conserve the German Fluxus artist, Wolf Vostell's monumental public sculpture, Concrete Traffic (1970). She is currently working on several projects, including a book on Hollis Frampton (based on her Ph.D. dissertation), a collection of essays and writings on and by the multi-media artist Patrick Clancy, and a digital humanities project related to Frampton's unfinished film "R". She is also co-editing a publication with Christine Mehring on Vostell Concrete.

I am currently revising my book manuscript on Hollis Frampton to address the potential contributions of his last, unfinished film “R” to the early history of the uses of artificial intelligence within artistic practices.

Researching Frampton’s “R” has opened up additional research pathways into the correspondences between gesture, language, images, and thought. This research has both drawn me to further art historical research on the work of Eadweard Muybridge, and into contemporary performance practices.

In 2022, in Paris, with Carolina Martínez and Jordi Márquez, I presented a lecture-performance, entitled "Body-Image-Word: Immersive Meditations into the Void of the Creative Unconscious." This performance-lecture incorporated bio-feedback manipulations of moving images taken from the history of film and video, each centered on the recording of the body in motion. Reading from selected texts across film studies, philosophy, literature, and art history, in both French and English, with both of us gesturing according to a score, our performance embraced elements of chance, with the images changing and transforming according to our bio-rhythms. A website dedicated to this work is currently in the planning stages.