About

Paula Levine is a media artist with deep roots in experimental narrative, and histories and dynamics of place. She works across media and technologies, and exhibits locally, nationally and internationally. Her videos have screened in such venues as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archives, Video Out in Vancouver, BC, NY Museum of Modern Art, the Canadian National Gallery, New York’s Lincoln Center and the Getty Center.

She has been an artist in residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts, the Experimental Television Center and the Djerassi Foundation, and has received many awards and grants including ones from the Canadian Council for the Arts, Art Matters, Inc., CanWest Global Award, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art). She was a 2013-14 Zero1 Fellow, with support from Google Public Policy, for a project entitled: On common ground, researching the intersection of global networks and empathy as a common good.

An early proponent of, and experimenter with GPS, her series, Shadows from another place employed locative and mobile technologies to collapse the safety of geographical distance and map the impact of distant events, such as political trauma or upheaval, onto local ground. San Francisco-Baghdad, a web work, maps the locations of sites bombed during the first night of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad upon San Francisco, transposing coordinates from each Baghdad site onto local ground. TheWall, also a web work, uses cartography, GPS, video and sound to follow the trajectory of the West Bank wall between Abu Dis and Qalandiya, interviewing, recording and mapping the impact of the wall upon daily lives and local economies along its route. TheWall-TheWorld was an online interactive site in Google Earth allowing viewers to explore the impact of the wall in the West Bank and, simultaneously within any other city in the world a user chose.

Her writings on locative media, new cartography and the expanding cartographic imagination have been presented at conferences at ISEA, ZERO1, MIT and the University of Wisconsin’s Conney conference for Jewish Studies. Her work has shown at ISEA, Interactive Futures, 09, Vancouver, British Columbia where she was also a keynote speaker. Her writing on “Art & GPS” was published in the Lea E-Journal in a special “Locative Media Curriculum” edited by Drew Hemment.  Her writing, “On Common Ground: Here as There,” is a chapter in The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies edited by Jason Farman and published by Routledge.

Paula Levine is a professor at San Francisco State University in The School of Art, and the head of the Digital Media // Emerging Technologies.