Frances Cullen is a PhD candidate in Art History specializing primarily in the histories and theories of photography and secondarily in those of cinema, media, and media art. Her dissertation analyses key works of contemporary photography to show how analog photography has been constructed and rhetorically deployed as an icon of obsolescence in the twenty-first century. In previous years this project was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship and Media@McGill. She currently holds a Max Stern Fellowship at McGill University’s Visual Arts Collection.
Earlier research projects considered the material and institutional status of film stills as well as the role of cinematic time as a theme in the contemporary art gallery. Before joining the department at McGill she studied art history at the University of Alberta; the material history of photography at Ryerson University; and cinema studies at the University of Toronto. She has also worked with photography and film collections, most notably during two years spent as a student and staff member at the George Eastman Museum, and has presented her work across Canada and in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom.