Casey Alt is an artist and theorist whose work explores how interface mediates power and culture. Casey grew up in rural North Dakota and attended high school on the Texas-Mexico border. In 1991 he enlisted as an Arabic linguist in the US Army and trained at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, where he graduated with honors as an advanced Arabic linguist in 1993. In 1994 Casey was accepted as a cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. While at West Point, Casey received numerous awards and distinctions, including top-ranked cadet of his class (3 semesters), Dean's List (3 semesters), Distinguished Cadet for 1993-1994 academic year, and the Rowe Memorial History Award in 1995.

Casey left West Point in 1996 to complete his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, where he majored in Human Biology and minored in Studio Art. He received his BA from Stanford in 1999, graduating with distinction and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Arthur Giese Memorial Award for Painting.

In fall of 1999, Casey continued his studies at Stanford as a graduate student in the Program in the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology with Professor Tim Lenoir. After completing his MA, he was subsequently accepted into the PhD program, where he received the Centennial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2003. While at Stanford, Casey's graduate research focused on the ways in which new media practices have transformed science and other forms of cultural production. In investigating this question, he has written on media as diverse as bioinformatics to comic books, 3D modeling programs to videogames. In 2001 Casey and Tim Lenoir founded the hpsCollaboratory as an independent group of humanists, designers, artists, and programmers devoted to creating new and innovative approaches to collaborative, digitally mediated, academic research.

In 2004 Casey began a leave of absence from his PhD program to accept a position as the Director of the Information Science + Information Studies Program at Duke University. In the fall of 2006, he returned to graduate school in the Masters of Fine Arts program of the Design | Media Arts Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently completing his second year. In 2007 he was selected as the graphics editor summer intern for The New York Times. Casey curently lives in Los Angeles, California.

MFA Thesis Committee: Anne Balsamo, Barbara Kruger, Rebeca Méndez (chair), & Christian Moeller.

[view PDF of CV]
[view PDF of Statement of Teaching Philosophy]

Email: caseyalt [at] gmail [dot] com

Photo by Cristin M.R. Paul