Ruti Talmor
Assistant Professor of Media Studies
With Pitzer Since: 2011
Field Group: Media Studies
Campus Address: Bernard 206
Phone: 909.607.5003
Email: ruti_talmor@pitzer.edu
Related Website: Intercollegiate Media Studies
Educational Background: BA, MA, PhD New York University
Ruti Talmor is a cultural anthropologist with training in art history and ethnographic film. She lectures and publishes on photography, documentary, queer media, intercultural art praxis, and transnational gender relations, with a special interest in Africa and the African diaspora. Her book manuscript Rastahood: A Ghanaian Tourist Art for the New Millennium explores the intersection of tourist art, transnational gender relations, neoliberal time, and millennial capitalism.
Talmor works as a curator and programmer. Recent projects include Glyphs: Acts of Inscription (Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2013): an exhibition, international symposium, and screening program that explored diasporic counter-archival visual practice, co-curated and co-produced with Renée Mussai; the exhibition and symposium Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video (Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, 2011); and the lecture series Frameworks: Photography Now (Haverford College, 2011) and LA Art Now (Pitzer College, 2016).
Talmor has been a Fellow of the Getty Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, the McCracken Foundation, and the University of Michigan’s Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.
Selected Publications
Rastahood: A Ghanaian Tourist Art for the New Millennium. In preparation.
Sameness and Difference. Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail The Dark Lioness. Exhibition Catalog. Curator: Renée Mussai. London, GB: Autograph ABP, 2017.
Glyphs: Acts of Inscription. Exhibition Catalog. Curators: Ruti Talmor and Renée Mussai. Claremont, CA: Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2014.
It Had to Be You. Glyphs: Acts of Inscription. Exhibition Catalog. Curators: Ruti Talmor and Renée Mussai. Claremont, CA: Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2014.
Craft as Expansion. The Haircraft Project. Exhibition Catalog. Curator: Sonya Clark. Richmond, VA: 1708 Gallery, 2014.
From the Margins You Push so that the Center Implodes. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19(3): 381-403, 2013.
Masks, Elephants, and Djembe Drums: Craft as Historical Experience in Ghana. Journal of Modern Craft 5(3): 295-320, 2012.
Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video. Exhibition catalog. Curator: R.
Talmor. Haverford, PA: CFG/Haverford College Publications, 2011.
Urban Drift. Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video. Haverford, PA: CFG/Haverford College Publications, 2011.
Icons of the Desert: The Revelatory Power of Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting. Anthropology Now 2(2): 9-21, 2010.
Courses Taught
Introduction to Media Studies
Introduction to Video Art
Introduction to Anthropology
The Anthropology of Media
Perspectives on Photography
Documentary Media
Artworlds: Contact Zones
Artist/Ethnographer Expeditions: Visual Fieldwork Methods
Art, Identity, and Popular Culture
The Intercultural Romance: Sexual Border-Crossings and Gender Transformations
Urban Life: Ethnography of the City
Visual Culture and Politics in the African Diaspora
African Masculinities