Simone Osthoff

  • Director, Studio for Sustainability and Social Action
  • Professor of Art
  • Artist

  • Scholar

  • Reader

  • Writer

  • Cultural Translator

  • Contemporary Art and Archives

  • Brazilian Art

  • Concrete and Neoconcrete Art

  • Media Art in the 1980s and 90s

  • Vilém Flusser

210 Patterson Building

Simone Osthoff

Biography

Simone Osthoff is Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Visual Arts at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is also the co-director of the S3A—Studio for Sustainability and Social Action.

A Brazilian-born and US-based artist and writer, her research questions canonical histories and archives, and it ranges from Brazilian women working with media art to in-depth inquiries into the works of Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Paulo Bruscky, and Eduardo Kac, as well as the philosopher Vilém Flusser. She holds a Ph.D. from the European Graduate School, an MA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA degree from the University of Maryland.

Osthoff has lectured widely in museums, universities, and symposia worldwide. Her essays, translated into eight languages, include the journals "Leonardo," "Flusser Studies," "Ars," and "Art Journal." Osthoff’s multiple book chapters were published by the MIT Press, Routledge, La Maison de La Photographie, and the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, among others. She is the author of the book "Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from a Repository of Documents to an Art Medium," and part of the editorial team of the multilingual journal Flusser Studies. Her artworks are included in a few museums and private collections and have been exhibited in venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, and the Documenta 12 in Kassel. Among awards and honorable mentions received is a Fulbright Fellowship.

Collected Works