Laura U. Marks

I research media ecology, non-Western media histories, experimental cinema, Islamic philosophy, Arab cinema, aesthetics, and embodiment. My books are The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos (Duke, 2024), Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015), Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota, 2002), and The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke, 2000). I lead research on the carbon footprint of streaming media and 2020 I founded the Small File Media Festival, which celebrates movies that stream at extremely low bitrate. With Azadeh Emadi I co-founded the Substantial Motion Research Network of artists and scholars working on non-Western approaches to media. I program experimental media art for venues around the world. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, I teach in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.