Nell Breyer

en

Nell Breyer was a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Program for Art, Culture & Technology (2002-2010); a Baryshnikov Art Center Fellow (2008-9) and Dance Theater Workshop digital ARM Fellow (2003-4). Breyer’s work has been shown in the US, Canada, Europe, the UK and Bangladesh. It addresses the intersection of dance, new media, and visual art.

Breyer's commissioned public art and video installations have been shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Rovereto and Trento, Italy, The Philadelphia Art Alliance, Boston City Hall, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, World Financial Center Arts & Events, The National Academy of Arts & Sciences, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, Photo NY, Dance Theater Workshop gallery and Carroll and Sons.  Breyer’s performance works have been presented in New York (The Joyce Soho, Judson Church, St. Mark’s, The Williamsburg Art Nexus); New England (MassMoca, The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, International Festival of Arts & Ideas); Canada (The MAI), the UK (The Place, Sadlers Wells Peacock Theater, Her Majesty’s Haymarket Theater), Bangladesh (The Bangladesh National Museum Auditorium, The Liberation War Museum); and Slovenia (Cankarajev Dom, TRNFEST).

Breyer received a doctorate in design from the Graduate School of Design (Harvard University, 2011); an M.S. in Media Arts & Sciences (MIT, 2002); an M.Sc. in Cognitive Neuroscience (Oxford University; 1997); and a B.A. in Fine Arts & Humanities, magna cum laude, with distinction (Yale University, 1994).

research

research expositions

  • Motion Perception: Interactive Video and Spatial Awareness (2011) author(s): Nell Breyer published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    Interactive video art is increasingly woven into urban public places around the world. A dominant argument about this growing form of public art is that it offers potential for new social, political and physical engagement with public space. However, there is little consensus or even analysis of just how such engagement is taking place. The exposition is an attempt to specify what drives the ‘physical engagement’ in this genre of work. It develops the argument that movement-centric and body-centric visualizations provide multi-modal movement representations, and that these can direct spatial attention through immersive and particularized experience. With reference to examples, the exposition concludes that interactive video art can offer a chronotopic experience in which space is understood through the time it takes to move the body.
     open exposition comments (2)