Hanna Rose Shell

Hanna Rose Shell is a Professor in the Division of Arts & Humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder, jointly appointed in the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts and the Department of Art & Art History. She is also core faculty in History and Philosophy of Science and a faculty affiliate of the Department of History and the Center of the American West. Shell previously served as Faculty Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for Media Arts, as Interim Director of the Program in Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, and as Scholar/Artist-in-Residence at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.

Shell is the author of Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (Zone Books, 2012) and Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She is the editor of The Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002) and co-editor of digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies (Princeton University Press, 2019). She has contributed essays to edited volumes and artist catalogs, including, most recently, “A Being with Pattern: Camouflage Consciousness in the Work of Jemima Wyman” for the 2026 retrospective exhibition Deep Surface.

 

Her award-winning documentaries include Aqua Kinema, Locomotion in Water, and Secondhand (Pèpè). Her films and media works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, and the Black Maria Film Festival. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Milton Fund, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and the Leo Marx Career Development Chair, which she held while serving as Assistant and Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Shell’s major teaching fields are film and media studies, critical and curatorial studies, histories of science, art, and environment, and science and technology studies (STS). Her courses invite students to explore how scientific knowledge and aesthetic practices emerge together, shaping not only the objects we study but also the ways we see, move, and make in the world. Through seminars, lectures, and studio-based explorations, she fosters learning environments that value interdisciplinary inquiry, historical depth, and imaginative thinking. Her teaching connects theory and practice while asking how the past informs the present—and how academic practice can respond to the urgencies of our time. Before joining the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018, Shell taught at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); she also taught at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) between 2020 and 2022, while serving as the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History in association with The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.