Rate My Professor Christopher Meerdo

Christopher Meerdo serves as Assistant Professor of Studio Art: New Media Art and Photography in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. He received his M.F.A. in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011 and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2012 to 2019. His artistic and scholarly practice centers on data archives, computational processes, digital forensics, encrypted imagery, leaked documents, synthetic media, and machine-learning techniques. Meerdo develops and instructs courses including "New Media Art Topics: Art and AI," where students train generative AI models using command-line interfaces, explore node-based coding, and engage with ethical issues such as plagiarism, environmental impact, and structural inequities through art-historical and theoretical frameworks. He advocates critiquing AI by delving into its mechanics, likening it to historical artists like Nam June Paik who repurposed technology for deeper understanding and poetry.

Meerdo has garnered significant recognition through awards and fellowships, including the 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for computational sculptural investigations into surveillance capitalism, the Hopper Prize Artist Grant in 2018, the Jan van Eyck Academie Fellowship, Faculty Enrichment Grant from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, and the William Bronson Mitchell and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Enhancement Fund in 2018. Residencies include SIM Reykjavik, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His publications encompass "Apeirophobia" in Techniques Journal (2024), "Superimposition" (2022), "Channeling" in DIAPHANES Magazine (2020), "Survey for White Artists" in Monday Journal (2021), and Sub-Ohm in Cocohunday (2017). Exhibitions feature venues such as Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina, Atlanta Contemporary, 47 Canal in New York, and Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh. Screenings occur at Nightingale Cinema in Chicago, Flat Earth Film Festival in Iceland, and nodoCARACAS in Venezuela. Recently, he co-organized the "Hallucinating Archive" symposium in Amsterdam, fostering collaborations on AI's role in cultural preservation. Represented by DOCUMENT Gallery in Chicago, Meerdo contributes to advancing critical discourse in new media and contemporary art.