About Antonia Lant
Brooklyn, New York
Antonia Lant (CBA ’22) is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. A specialist in silent cinema, women’s work in filmmaking, and the intersection of theories of film and art history, she is the author of Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (1991), and Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (2007). Lant was a Founding Director of NYU’s Masters’ in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation; and a member of the National Film Preservation Board. She was international advisor for “Texture Matters,” a media research project based at Vienna University. Lant has recently held fellowships at the IKKM, Weimar; and at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard, where she was writing her forthcoming book, The Race Machine: When Cinema Claimed Ancient Egypt. She trained in Fine Arts (undergraduate) at Leeds University, and still paints.
At CBA, Lant investigated film, performance, photographs, and installations of the 1970s in order to see how, and if, post-World War II procreative transformations and their machines (the contraceptive pill; the lasting illegality of abortion; the beginnings of IVF; the arrival of obstetric ultrasound; the first “test-tube baby”; and the worldwide impact of Nilssen’s portrait of an 18-week-old fetus on Life’s 1965 cover) reshaped our perceptions of the body as well the materials and concerns of art-making. Lant brought figures of the pair and pas de deux into dialog with the science of reproduction. Using this research, Lant plans to write a book chapter describing how the dancing body was being newly conceived in the 1970s.
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