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Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts department. He has a B.A. in history from Columbia University, an MA in Media Studies from SUNY Buffalo, and a Ph.D. from UCLA in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA. He is the founder and director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA).

PROMPT: Art and Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, produced with Mieke Gerritzen comes out in October, 2026 from Bis. His alternate, connectionist history of Southern California’s cultural lives, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined, was published in 2020 by Viking/Penguin. Digital_Humanities, co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, was published in 2012 by the MIT Press. Of The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (MIT Press, 2011), Jan Baetens writes that it is a book whose political importance can be compared to that of McLuhan, Adorno (one will think here of Minima Moralia), and Dewey. USER: InfoTechnoDemo (MIT, 2005) “begs to be compared with the landmark 1966 collaboration by Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel, and Marshall McLuhan that resulted in The Medium is the Massage.” New Scientist’s featured review of Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media & Cultures (MIT, 2000) concluded by saying that artists working with digital technologies now have their bible, their Stones of Venice, their Ways of Seeing.” Afterimage referred to the edited collection The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT, 1999) as the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there.

He is creator and editorial director of the MIT Press’ multi-award-winning Mediawork project. These “theoretical fetish objects” cover the intersections of media, art, design and technology. The pamphlets have been discussed everywhere from the New York Review of Books to Entertainment Weekly, and have won awards for both writing and design. Lev Manovich, lauds them as “a new operating system for the book. The project is supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeffrey and Catharine Soros. They include Utopian Entrepreneur (2001) by Brenda Laurel, designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp; Writing Machines (2002) by N. Katherine Hayles, designed by Anne Burdick; Rhythm Science (2004) by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, designed by COMA; and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling, designed by Lorraine Wild (2005).

Honors and fellowships include being selected to give the 2025 UCLA Faculty Research Lecture, the 2016 Internal Award for Art Criticism (from the IAAC), the Dorothy Lee Prize for Scholarship in 2013 (from the MEA), and fellowships at the Bergman Foundation on Faro Island in Sweden (2024), at the Huntington Library (Dana and David Dornsife Fellow, 2015-16), USC Annenberg Center (Vectors, 2007), and the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris (2005). http://www.peterlunenfeld.com

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Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in UCLA’s Design|Media Arts department and founding director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA). His books include PROMPT: Art and Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Bis, 2026), City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined (Viking, 2020), Digital_Humanities (co-author, MIT, 2012), The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading (MIT, 2011), USER (MIT, 2005), Snap to Grid (MIT, 2000), The Digital Dialectic (editor, MIT, 1999), and the MIT Press Mediawork series. He holds a Ph.D. in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA. http://www.peterlunenfeld.com

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Peter Lunenfeld professor, UCLA Design Media Arts, is director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA). Recent work include PROMPT: Art and Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined, The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, and Digital_Humanities (co-author). http://www.peterlunenfeld.com

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Peter Lunenfeld is Professor, UCLA Design Media Arts department. http://www.peterlunenfeld.com

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