Nora Alter

Nora Alter is a professor at Temple University’s School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts. She served as Chair of the Department from 2009-2013. She is founding director of Temple’s Venice Study Abroad Summer Program and is former founding Director of FMA’s Los Angeles Study Away Program. Alter is culturally fluent in European and North American arts and culture. Alter completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of Florida. Alter is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana 1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (Michigan 2002), Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (Berghahn 2004), Chris Marker (Illinois 2006), Essays on the Essay Film (Columbia 2017), and The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (Columbia 2018). She has published on topics in contemporary art, film, and cultural, visual, and performance studies, as well as on artists John Akomfrah, Yael Bartana, Stan Douglas, Maria Eichhorn, Renée Green, Hans Haacke, Daniel Eisenberg, Martha Rosler, and Hito Steyerl among others. Alter’s work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, National Endowment for the Humanities, Howard Foundation, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. From 2008-2017 she served on the Committee on Modern and Contemporary Art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Slought Foundation and on the editorial board of the journal Afterimage. In 2020 she was awarded an Art Writers Grant for her book-length project: Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, and in Spring 2021 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Current interests include research on sound and politics.