Anne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. She is actively engaged in educating the technological imagination across cultural domains.
This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer, and entrepreneur. She is currently a Full Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC where she created one of the first academic programs in multimedia literacy across the curriculum. In 2002, she co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Here she was involved in the creation of novel interactives for clients such as Sun Microsystems, the Liberty Science Center, Singapore Science Center, and the Papalote Children¹s Museum in Mexico City. Previously she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research-design group at Xerox PARC who created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED’s interactive museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading that toured Science/Technology Museums in the U.S. from 2000-2003. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her new book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke UP, forthcoming) examines the relationship between the technological imagination, cultural reproduction and technological innovation. Her current research interests include the future of libraries and museums in a digital age, the role of tinkering in knowledge-production, and the emergence of public interactives as a new urban media form.