Rachel Ward is a Ph.D. candidate conducting anthropological research in artists’ studios and archives in New York City. She has an M.Sc. in Social Anthropology and a G.Dip. in Visual Anthropology, focusing on documentary filmmaking, archaeology, digital art and culture.
Now pursuing her doctorate in Interactive Arts & Technology, Rachel’s work converges on Digital Anthropology and the creation of imaginative, artistic and experiential technologies for cultural preservation.
She has designed and built anthropological art installations, such as liliuokalani. archival experimentations., generating embodied access to the Archive via haptic-interactivity. She describes these projects in her book chapter in Digital Echoes (2018).
She has produced several documentaries, including a short about the overlap of Appalachian and punk music and Sneakerhead (2016), a portrait of an overzealous Air Jordan collector, which was featured in a 6-month exhibition in the Museum of Vancouver (MoV).
As of 2020, Rachel is collaborating with digital art(ists) in New York City and their complex archives to envision embodied multisensory access to their work in museum archives. Some of her preliminary research was recently published in the Electronic Media Review (2020).
Two websites I built recently / dianneblell.com / evafaye.com
