Biography
Constance Penley is a professor of Film and Media Studies, the founding director, and past co-director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. She is also a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press and recently celebrating its 100th issue.
Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. Penley is the editor or co-editor of several influential and field-changing collections, including Feminism and Film Theory; Male Trouble; Technoculture; Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction; The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender, and most recently, from The Feminist Press, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, (trans. German and Spanish) with Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young.
Penley’s large public art projects include PrimetimeArt by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, first commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles in 1995 as In the Name of the Place and rebooted and reimagined by Red Bull Studios in NYC in 2016 as TOTAL PROOF, and Biospheria: an environmental opera.
She won the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award for “DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea” and co-produced HBO’s Porn 101 with Katie Morgan, continuing her dual research focus on popular science and popular sex.
Other awards include the Kenneth Burke Society Prize for Excellence in Rhetorical Studies and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
Penley is widely recognized as a founder of the media subfields of feminist film theory, porn studies, fan studies, and environmental media.
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