Holly Willis, Ph.D.

Research Assistant Professor
Director of Academic Programs, Institute for Multimedia Literacy

Holly Willis is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts, as well as Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum.

Willis’ current research centers on the intersection of media art, graphic design and rhetoric, and the ways ideas and formal strategies from each might inform contemporary scholarly practices. She oversees the IML’s research in the pedagogical uses of multiuser virtual environments such as Second Life, promotes the use of numerous online tools for writing and research, and is currently developing ideas centered on a pedagogical practice transformed algorithimically, asking what a pedagogical practice
grounded in algorithmic unfolding and machinic processes might look like.

Willis is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things (Art Center College of Design, 2007), a collection of essays, words, images and fiction that grapples with the potential and design challenges of pervasive computing, and she is the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, which chronicles the advent of digital filmmakingtools and their impact on contemporary media practices. The former editor of RES Magazine, Ms. Willis has written extensively on experimental media practices and emerging pedagogical models for a variety of publications, and is currently editing a collection of essays centered on multimedia scholarship.