Heather Warren-Crow, Ph.D.

Heather Warren-Crow (they/she/he) is a time-based artist and media theorist. As a mentor of graduate students, they specialize in supporting practice-based, feminist, and/or philosophy-oriented arts research; projects engaging with film and media studies; and performance and intermedia art. Dr. Warren-Crow is the winner of two teaching awards and the Chancellor's Council Distinguished Research Award, the TTU System's highest honor. They like intellectually unruly projects.

Dr. Warren-Crow’s artistic practice uses repetition to fiddle with the boundary between the preprogrammed and the spontaneous. Currently working primarily in experimental film and sound art, they design stubbornly lo-tech procedures for media creation, often using their own messy bodily and cognitive labor to accomplish what computational algorithms do better. For various process-focused pieces, they compiled every reference to the smell of money on Google Books; made a list of every description of the sound of animal labor from the closed captions of Westerns streamed day and night over a period of two weeks; and used microbes to decompose 35 mm found footage over 10 days for a film about death. Their work participates in the ongoing redefinition of personhood in response to new communication technologies. It has been shown at festivals and in galleries around the world—recently, in Pune (India), Venice (Italy), London (UK), Austin (Texas), and Kansk (Russia).

Most of Dr. Warren-Crow’s academic writing accounts for 19th-21st century new media—from photography and animation to social media and generative AI—as speculative philosophies of personhood. Their scholarship is distinctive in its approach to animation studies and its early attention to girliness as an operative aesthetic in online settings. Dr. Warren-Crow has written three books: Girlhood and the Plastic Image, Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun (co-authored with Andrea Jonsson), and Shakespeare and Nonhuman Intelligence, which presents the Bard as the embattled figure of writing in the age of ChatGPT and other alleged crimes against the human organism.

They are a member of CO-OPt, an artist-run gallery and experimental music venue here in Lubbock profiled in The Wire music magazine, and artist-in-residence at a biophysics lab in Massachusetts.

Portfolio