Kasra

Mona Kasra is an Iranian American new media artist, designer, and interdisciplinary scholar. Her research investigates the political and theoretical implications of visual media technologies within our culture and cross-culturally, and her creative practice experiments with the affordances of media technologies within artistic forms and in a variety of improvisational framings. Her artwork has been exhibited widely in galleries and film festivals across the US and worldwide, and she has juried, curated, and programmed for many exhibitions, film festivals, and conferences. Mona also designs projections and interactive media installations and has received two Helen Hayes Award nominations for her media design work for live performances. Her recent publications can be found in several journals including New Media & Society, The Communication Review, Journal of Dance Education, and Media and Communication. 

At the University of Virginia, Mona lectures and teaches courses on digital art, projection design, projections mapping, integrated interactive media, and immersive media. She is a faculty co-lead at the Karsh Institute’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. She was previously a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) as well as the New College Curriculum. In 2023, she completed the semester-long leadership development program at UVA called Leadership in Academic Matters (LAM), which focuses on recognizing, supporting, and nurturing those with demonstrated leadership characteristics and future potential across various roles. Currently, Mona holds leadership roles: an elected member of the executive committee (2019-2025) and Chair of ACM SIGGRAPH (2023-2024), and a board member for the New Media Caucus.  www.monakasra.com

DEGREES:

2015 PhD in Arts & Technology 
University of Texas at Dallas

2005 MFA in Video / Digital Art
California State University, Northridge

2000 BFA in Graphic Design & Visual Arts
Art University, Tehran, Iran