Charissa N. Terranova is an environmental humanist reshaping the history of art and architecture through systems perspectives. She researches the role of nature, biology, and biotechnology in the history of art and architecture. She is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History in the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas [UTD]. She is also a researcher in the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at UTD.
Terranova teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in art and architectural history and theory. Undergrad course topics include histories of modern architecture; contemporary art; new media art; experimental art and architecture; robots, cyborgs, and AI in art; and women in art. Subjects in graduate seminars include: What does it mean to be human?; Dematerialization and Rematerialization in Art, 1914-Present; Marxist and Phenomenological Bodies in Art; Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Beauty; Charles Darwin and Darwinism in the Arts; From Bauhaus to Biohaus -- Biology and Cybernetics in Art, Architecture, and Design; Soylent Green -- Readings in New Media Art and Theory; and Planet of the Apes -- Art, Design, and the Anthropocene. For syllabi, lectures, and course presentations, go to the link above for 'courses.'
Her latest book Organic Modernism: from the British Bauhaus to Cybernetics (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2024) is an interdisciplinary study of "organicism," the age-old anti-reductionist philosophy maintaining the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The book, which is open access and free of charge, uses the historical framework of “organic modernism” to explore the braiding of culture and science in twentieth-century art and architecture. It follows the red thread of organicism through a host of manifestations in the UK, including modern architecture, surrealism, postwar social democracy, the welfare state, epigenetics, robotic and cybernetic art, design, and exhibition curation. A sequel to Terranova's Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (Bloomsbury, 2022 [2016]), Organic Modernism reveals the biological roots of cybernetics in the British context.
She has extensive curatorial experience, most recently organizing Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art at SP/N Gallery, UTD, Feb 7-April 28, 2026. From September 2015 to February 2016, Terranova collaborated with Davidson College Professor of Biology David Wessner in the SciArt Center NYC's virtual residency program. As part of the residency, Terranova and Wessner co-curated in February 2016 Gut Instinct: Art, Design, and the Microbiome, an on-line exhibition about art, the gut-brain axis, and gastrointestinal microbiome. In the fall of 2015, she curated Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images, an exhibition about the scientific concept of "chirality," or non-superimposable mirror images, within art. She was inaugural director and curator of Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency, which was the job that brought her in 2007 to UTD from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Terranova may be reached through university email: terranova@utdallas.edu.