Artemis Willis is a media historian and media arts curator. During her time as an ODL Fellow, one of the topics Willis is taking up is an investigation of how the magic lantern participates in and sheds light on the documentary project. Her research and teaching focus on media archaeology, early cinema, avant-garde film and multimedia performance, and the long documentary tradition. She is a board member of the Chicago Film Society, a former member of the Executive Committee of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, and a past Vice-President of the New York Film/Video Council, New York’s oldest continuously operating nonprofit serving the independent film and media community. Her essays have appeared in such edited collections and journals as A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning (Indiana University Press, 2020), The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (Indiana University Press, 2018), and Early Popular Visual Culture. She has organized film tributes, retrospectives, and magic lantern shows at the National Gallery of Art, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Smithsonian Institution, Anthology Film Archives, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her own films and lantern performances have been presented at various museums, festivals, and conferences in the U.S. and overseas. She received her BA in Art History from Wellesley College, her MA in Film Studies from Columbia University, and her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago.
While at OpenDocLab, Willis is working on her first book, Lanternology: The Magic Lantern and the Possibilities of the Projected Image and related exhibitions. She is also developing a digital version of the Keystone 600 Set, a seminal visual-instructional system of corresponding and cross-referring views (lantern slides and stereographs), and creating a hybrid slide-film performance piece.