CMMU Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Prof. Demos researches and writes about modern and contemporary art, activism, radical politics, and political ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (2016), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017), and Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023).

Research Interests

Contemporary art and visual culture; environmental arts and political ecology; social movement aesthetics and activism; documentary, surveillance, AI, new media. Emergent research interests include urban counterinsurgency, techno-cultural geographies of US militarism, and the forms of social movement resistance.

Biography, Education and Training

 T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.

Prof. Demos also served as Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. Demos co-curated Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015; curated the film program Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014; and curated the presentation of the Center for Creative Ecologies at Manifesta 13 in Marseille, 2020.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Professor Demos co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos was Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon.

Selected Publications

 T. J. Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice to Come (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2023).

T. J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017).

T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).

T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).

T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).

T. J. Demos, Dara Birnbaum: Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press and Afterall Books, 2010).

T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).