Joseph Steele is a Denver-based artist-curator and filmmaker. He is a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices, and his dissertation looks at Archive Poiesis: traces and artist-curators making in the archives. He is working on exhibition planning and conducting research at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Clyfford Still Museum, the Herbert Bayer Archive at Denver Public Library's Special Collections, CU Art Museum, Lucy Lippard's artist's books in CU Boulder's Special Collections, the Van Abbemuseum, and the Photograph Collection at the Warburg Institute, SAS University of London.
Joe holds a masters in design studies in art, design, and the public domain from the Harvard GSD, where he worked with Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jeffrey Schnapp, the Sensory Ethnography Lab / FSC, and the Film and Visual Studies Department (with Laura Frahm, Sharon Harper, Stephen Prina, and Jennifer Bornstein). He is a member of AgX Film Collective in Waltham and was a fellow at MIT's OpenDocumentary Lab in 2017. In 2015 he was awarded the Community Service Fellowship from the Harvard GSD to pursue a project with Design Studio for Social Intervention in Roxbury and SenseLab at Concordia in Montreal. Joe was a creative affiliate at metaLAB from 2014-2017.
Joe has presented work at Film in the Present Tense conference 2017 through LaborBerlin / RE:MI, CU Art Museum, Harvard's FVS 2nd annual conference, at Counterpath Press in Denver as part of REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION (Julie Carr, Omnidawn Press), and at the 2019 &NOW Conference, UW Bothell. Joe published in Inflexions Journal – issue no. 9: F(r)ictions – and is on the editorial board at Manifold Press, a press for experimental criticism based in Denver.