Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT where she is Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. Before this, she worked as Professor of Film and Media Studies, and Department Chair, at UC Santa Barbara. She is a leading film and media scholar with interests in media history, science and technology studies, and environmental media. She is the author or editor of seven books and over 100 articles and book chapters. Parks has been a principle investigator on major research grants from the National Science Foundation and has conducted fieldwork in Mongolia, Tanzania, and Zambia. She has taught many university film classes over the years, collaborated with artists and filmmakers around the world, and has served on film festival and award juries, including for the American Film Institute and the Peabody awards. Parks recently published an article about animals and infrastructures, which appeared in the book, Being Material (MIT Press, 2019), and serves on the editorial boards of the journals, Environment+Media, Journal of Environmental Media, and Film Quarterly, among others. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, is a Faculty Fellow at the University of Montana’s Humanities Institute, and lives part-time in Missoula with her husband, John, and their dog, Luna.
