Vanessa R. Schwartz

Vanessa R. Schwartz grew up in New York where she was lucky enough to learn French as a small child and had access to a country that seemed to have a long, colorful and sometimes glorious past. A firm believer in the importance of all the arts: high, low and everything in between, she has spent most of her career studying the power of the mass cultural image to inform as much as to entertain. She teaches the history of visual culture of Europe and America at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Visual Studies Research Institute.