Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose work explores the history of photography, film, and modernist aesthetics through an ecological lens. She is currently completing her first monograph, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of air pollution as a photographic problem. An excerpt of this project has appeared in Representations as “The Air of Objectivity: AlbertRenger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry” and received an Emerging Scholars Publication Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.
Concurrently, she has also begun work on a second project, Heliotropic Media: Botanical Experiments in Photography, which traces the intertwined histories of botanical and photochemical research across scientific, amateur, and occult contexts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Other research interests include the visual culture of science; educational, scientific, and sponsored film; socialist photography and cinema (particularly in the Weimar Republic and East Germany); ecocriticism and environmental media; and abstraction across media (especially the monochrome format).
Prior to joining Berkeley, Korola served as Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the NOMIS Fellowship at the University of Basel’s eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Fonds de la recherche du Québec (FRQSC), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has also held curatorial fellowships at the Art Institute of Chicago and Smart Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection (2022). Besides her research, she also enjoys experimenting with historical and alternative photographic processes.
