New guest blogger: Julia Steinmetz

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Thanks to Nicholas O’Brien for helping us navigate the complex and compelling world of new media (or, as he likes to put it, ‘newMedia‘). Follow his post-Art21 pursuits back on his own blog here.

Up next is Julia Steinmetz, an artist, computer nerd, designer, writer, and scholar. She co-founded the feminist art collective Toxic Titties, a Los Angeles-based group using performance, film, and video to bring a subcultural phenomenon into the frame of conceptual art. The Toxic Titties have performed, exhibited and screened their work extensively in festivals, museums, galleries, and bars around the globe. Julia’s essay critically documenting the TT’s rouge ethnography of a Vanessa Beecroft performance at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills (Beecroft Intervention, 2002) was published in the Spring 2006 issue of the journal Signs.

Julia is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she earned an MA in Spring 2006. She is currently researching and writing about transfeminism, contemporary feminist media art, and performance and technology. Julia also has an MFA in Photography and Media Art from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts, 2002). She is trying to strike a balance between her art practice, research, critical writing, and teaching. She also practices yoga, hops on airplanes as much as possible, and is training for a triathlon, all of which helps keep things in perspective. Julia hopes to spend a lot more time watching television and reading US Weekly in the near future. She is currently cheating on Los Angeles and having an affair with New York.