Alena Williams is a NOMIS–eikones Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and university professor of Theory and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Austria).
Born in the United States, Williams studied 20th-century European and American art, with a specialization in technology and visual culture, 1860–1947, receiving her doctorate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. Before she began teaching in Vienna in 2025, Williams was associate professor with tenure in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where she was associate director of the Environmental Studies Program at John Muir College. She has also taught in the Department of Art History and Studio Art and the Graduate Art Program at Williams College and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Williams was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2017); a DAAD Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Design at the Universität der Künste Berlin (2018); and a society fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2019–2020). Her research and projects have been supported by the Hellman Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Research Foundation (DFG); the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the Lannan Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.
Research Focus
Williams’ research intertwines and enhances two ongoing areas of interest: the epistemology of the image; and historical and contemporary debates on environmental politics from the critical perspective of practitioners, activists and scholars. Her NOMIS project Visualizing Work: The Politics of Energy, Labor, and the Visual Archive, 1883-1933 explores the history of electrification through the visual lens of one of the most significant international electrical firms of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). Past projects have focused on the media archaeology of expanded cinema and histories of the projected image; the interrelation of environmental art and media; as well as the relationship between subjectivity, artistic practice and creative life. A curator and writer on modern and contemporary art, Williams organized Nancy Holt: Sightlines (2010–2013), an international traveling exhibition on American artist Nancy Holt’s land art, films, videos and related works from 1966–1980 for the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University with the retrospective companion volume published with the University of California Press (2011; 2015), among other exhibitions and film screenings internationally.
Feature image: Alena Williams portrait by Ursula Paletta. Right: Production still, Emily Wardill, Night for Day (2020). HD video, color, sound, 48 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin.