Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in new media, cultural studies, and globalization in the arts. Her writings have been published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Flash Art, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is also a regular contributor to the international contemporary art journal ExitEXPRESS (Spain). She began teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007.
Murray’s scholarship seeks to unearth the ways that a global phenomenon of electronic mass media and communications technologies shapes human interactions and interpenetrates contemporary experience. How do race, nation, class, gender, and access affect who may share in this experience? How do the technologies that we have fashioned, in turn, refashion us? In her analysis of photography, film, video, electronics, and the digital, Murray seeks to illuminate these technological expressions within the social, theoretical, and historical contexts from which they arise.