Amanda Wasielewski

Short presentation

Amanda Wasielewski is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor (Docent) of Art History. Her research investigates the impact of digital technology in art, architecture, and cultural heritage institutions. Her recent focus has been on the use of artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis and creation of art and other visual media. Her current research and teaching is within Digital Art History and Digital Cultural Heritage. (photo: Göran Ekeberg)

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• art history
• digital art history
• digital humanities
• digital and media art
• visual culture
• virtual reality
• photography
• photography history and theory
• cultural heritage
• urban space
• history of science
• museums
• computer vision
• critical AI
• generative AI

Biography

Amanda Wasielewski is an art historian and artist. Her academic work investigates how digital culture effects contemporary art practice and art historical methodology. Her recent work addresses the use of artificial intelligence techniques in both contemporary art and art history from a critical perspective. Her previous work focused on urban spatial practice and artistic communities and their relationship to digital technologies. In particular, she is interested in the politics of urban change in relation to artist's occupation of space and their interest in social justice and activism.

She has also conducted research into cultural heritage and museums, particularly regarding the use of digital tools and in relation to the history of science and the modernist colonial ideologies of museum and image collections.

Wasielewski has previously taught art history at Lehman College in New York, architectural history at the Spitzer School of Architecture in New York, media studies at the University of Amsterdam, and art history at Stockholm University.

Wasielewski was promoted to the rank of docent in Art History at Stockholm University. She holds a PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, an MPhil in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, an MA in Fine Art (Media) from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and a BA in Art History, Art Theory and Practice and Chemistry (minor) from Northwestern University.

Wasielewski is the author of four monographs: Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero, 2018), From City Space to Cyberspace: Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023), and Digital Photography After AI: Continuity and Rupture in the Age of Automated Images (MIT Press, 2026). She also co-edited the volume Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era (Intellect, 2024) with Prof. Anna Näslund.

In 2023 she was awarded a grant from Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program for her work on photography and AI. Wasielewski has recently served as an advisor to the Swedish parliament and collaborated with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre on cultural policy and AI.

Wasielewski is part of several research networks that received funding in recent years. For example, she is part of the steering committee for the AIsthesis network, funded by the Danish Research Council for operations between 2025 and 2028. The network consists of international researchers based in Scandinavian universities who are active in research at the intersection of art, aesthetics, and AI. She is also a member of several professional societies and committees. She is a board member of the digital art history society (DAHS) and a member of the Committee for Research and Scholarship for the College Art Association.

She is also regularly interviewed in the press, on podcasts, and from other parts of the media landscape. For example, she recently took part in a documentary on art authentication and AI as an expert participant for Swedish public television (SVT) called "Da Vinici-mysteriet i Söderköping". She has also been interviewed by journalists from the New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, the Atlantic, Swedish Elle magazine, Swedish radio (SR), popular tech podcast Practical A.I., and by think tanks and documentary filmmakers.

As a practicing artist, Wasielewski has exhibited her work internationally. She was a resident artist and stipend recipient at De Ateliers in Amsterdam between 2010 and 2012. She has exhibited at De Appel, Amsterdam, De Hallen Museum, Haarlem, and Between Bridges in Berlin, among other venues. She was also active in curatorial projects between 2009 and 2011, including the moving image art screen series Duration London. As an undergraduate, she attended Goldsmiths College to study fine art before doing a master's at the Slade. Her artistic work focuses on video, performance, and installation. In her artistic work, she is interested in urban space and histories of technology.

Research

Publications

Monographs

• Digital Photography after AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2026.
• Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
• From City Space to Cyberspace: Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
• Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers. Arlesford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2018.

Edited Books

• Wasielewski, Amanda, and Anna Näslund, eds. Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era. Bristol: Intellect, 2024.

Book Chapters

Wasielewski, Amanda. “What Do AI-Generated Images Want?” in Synthetic Aesthetics: Art History and AI Visual Cultures, edited by Daniel Neofetou and Ian Rothwell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, exp. 2027. (forthcoming)

Wasielewski, Amanda. “New Models for Art History: Machine Epistemologies” in AI and Art History, edited by Leda Cempellin and Melissa Geiger, Springer/Nature, exp. 2026. (forthcoming)

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Chance Encounters: AI-Generated Architectural Photography” in Architecture X Architecture A Dialectic, edited by Christiane Robbins. Hong Kong: Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, (jan) 2026. (forthcoming)

Wasielewski, Amanda and Rebecca Desjardins. “Dragons, Chimeras, and Mermaids: An Artistic Taxonomy of Animal Specimens from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center” in ‘Weder Fisch noch Fleisch’: Tierpräparation vor 1850 in Theorie und Praxis. Berlin: J.B. Metzler, 2025. (forthcoming)

Wasielewski, Amanda. “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: Computer Vision and the Art Theory of Joseph Beuys.” Artificial Intelligence and Art History: Looking at Pictures in an Algorithmic Culture, edited by Kathryn Brown. London: Proceedings of the British Academy, 2026. (forthcoming)

Wasielewski, Amanda, and Matti La Mela. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in the Department of ALM?” In Kod & Kultur. Institutionen För ABM i Uppsala 30 År– En Forskarantologi, edited by Kerstin Rydbeck, Isto Huvila, and Anna Foka. The Department of ALM, 2025.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “The Role of Artists in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” in Decentering Ethics: AI Art as Method, edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde, 307–322. London: Open Humanities Press, 2025.

Wasielewski, Amanda, and Anna Näslund. “Critical Digital Art History: An Introduction.” In Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, edited by Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund, 1–19. Bristol: Intellect, 2024.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Zombie Canon: Art Datasets, Generative AI, and the Reanimation of the Western Canon of Art.” In Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, edited by Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund, 123–45. Bristol: Intellect, 2024.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “The Latent Objective World: Photography and the Real after Generative AI.” In Virtual Photography: Artificial Intelligence, in-Game, and Extended Reality, edited by Ali Shobieri and Helen Westgeest, 27–45. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “The Growing Pains of Digital Art History: Issues for the study of art using computational methods.” In Digital Human Sciences: New Objects – New Approaches, edited by Sonya Petersson, 127-151. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2021.

Wasielewski, Amanda and Anna Dahlgren. “Mining Art History: Bulk Converting Non-Standard PDFs to Text to Determine the Frequency of Citations and Key Terms in Humanities Articles.” In Digital Human Sciences: New Objects – New Approaches, edited by Sonya Petersson, 285-305. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2021.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “‘We Have Decided Not To Decide’: The End of History and the Punk Politics of De Reagering.” In Aftermath: the Fall and Rise After the Event, edited by Robert Kusek, Beata Piątek, and Wojciech Szymański, 177-192. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2019.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “PKP-TV: Pirate Utopias.” In Maarten Ploeg: Ploeg + Werk, 1958-2004. Amsterdam: Maarten Ploeg Trust, 2018.

Edited Journal Issue

Dahlgren, Anna, Karin Hansson, Ramón Reichart, and Amanda Wasielewski. “The Politics of Metadata.” Special Issue, Digital Culture & Society 6, no. 2 (2020).

Academic Journal Articles

Arman Noroozian, Lorena Aldana, Marta Arisi, Hadi Asghari, Renata Avila, Pietro Giovanni Bizzaro, Ramya Chandrasekhar, Cristian Consonni, Deborah De Angelis, Francesca De Chiara, Maria del Rio-Chanona, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Maria Eriksson, Frederic Font, Emilia Gomez, Valérian Guillier, Lisa Gutermuth, David Hartmann, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Paul Keller, Felix Stalder, Joao Vinagre, Denny Vrandečić, and Amanda Wasielewski. “Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons: Five Open Questions and Knowledge Gaps.” arXiv:2508.06470. Preprint, arXiv, August 8, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.06470.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Abundance and Absence in AI: A Review of ‘Missing Mirror: Photography through the Lens of AI.’” Photography and Culture 18, no. 1 (2025): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2025.2478753. (exhibition review)

Wasielewski, Amanda. “AI-Generated Images and Photography: The General and the Specific.” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 2 (January 2025): 423–31.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Unnatural Images: On AI-Generated Photography.” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 1 (Autumn 2024).

Wasielewski, Amanda. “DALL-E in Flatland: Illusion, Space, and AI-Generated Images.” Media Theory 8, no. 1 (June 11, 2024): 185–204.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “The Reification of Style in AI Image Generation.” Hertziana Studies in Art History 3 (2024). https://hsah.humanitiesconnect.pub/articles/10.48431/hsah.030.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Authenticity and the Poor Image in the Age of Deep Learning.” Photographies 16, no. 2 (May 4, 2023): 191–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2023.2189158.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “‘Midjourney Can’t Count’: Questions of Representation and Meaning for Text-to-Image Generators.” IMAGE: Zeitschrift Für Interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft 37, no. 1 (May 2023): 70–81.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “The Museum in Quarantine: Architecture, Experience, and the Virtual Museum Tour.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 11, no. 1 (April 2022): 4-24.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Interfaces of Art: Meyer Schapiro, Fernand Léger, and the Role of the Art Historian in Anachronistic Artistic Influence.” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 26 (June 2022). https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2022/05/wasielewski.pdf.

Näslund, Anna and Amanda Wasielewski. “The Digital U-Turn in Art History.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 90, no. 4 (October 2, 2021): 249–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2021.2006774.

Näslund, Anna and Amanda Wasielewski. “Cultures of Digitization: A Historiographic Perspective on Digital Art History.” Visual Resources (September 30, 2021): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1928864.

Dahlgren, Anna, Karin Hansson, Ramón Reichert and Amanda Wasielewski. “Introduction: The Politics of Metadata.” Digital Culture & Society 6, no. 2 (2020): 7-17.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “From Rogue Sign to Squatter Symbol.” City 23, no. 2 (March 4, 2019): 256–67.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Books Were Opened: The Apocalypse of Margaret of York (Ms. M.484) and Spiritual Empowerment of the Laity in the Fifteenth Century.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 5, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 76-110.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Lurking Within Reach: Stereoscopic Photomicrography in the 1860s.” History of Photography 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 56–70.

Wasielewski, Amanda. “Grains of Gold in All This Shit: Web 2.0, Crowdsourcing and Participatory Art.” Hz Journal, no. 16 (March, 2011). http://www.hz-journal.org/n16/wasielewski.html.