Jason Livingston, an Upstate New York film and video maker, lectures in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.   He holds an M.F.A. in Film & Video Production and an M.A. in Communication Studies (Theories of the Avant-Garde) from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Cornell University.  He has previously served as a James B. Pendleton Teaching Fellow and assistant professor at Ithaca College, and the former managing director of Cornell Cinema, to name a few.  His work has been programmed at many festivals and venues, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the Austrian Film Museum, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, Ann Arbor and more. Under Foot & Overstory, winner of a Jury Prize from the New York Underground Film Festival, can be rented from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. The Two Boys: earned a Special Director’s Prize for Poet of the Cinema at the late, great Cinema Texas. Some of his recent video work can be seen as part of ETC: Experimental Television Center 1969-2009, a 5-DVD Anthology distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. He is a recipient of a New York State Council of the Arts Individual Artist Grant for his work-in-progress, INTERSTATE, a long-form video essay about video collectives, the Socialist Workers Party, the Onondaga Nation, family history, political economy and disco. In addition to making moving images, he has worked in film exhibition, most notably with THAW in the late 1990s and with Cornell Cinema from 2002 – 2004. He occasionally writes about cinema for such publications as The Brooklyn Rail.

Artist/speaker page: http://www.jasontlivingston.com/

Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art (PLASMA) is a speaker series of leading practitioners and theorists on contemporary practices and discourses in media art and culture. PLASMA is presented each spring by the Department of Media Study. PLASMA 2016 is co-sponsored by the Dept. of English, the Dept. of Geography, DISC (Committee on Digital Scholarship and Cultures), the Humanities Institute, the UB Technē Institute, and the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. The series is open to the public, the UB community, and to all who are interested in any of the invited guests. The public is enthusiastically welcome to come to one or any of the presented events free of charge.