Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography, film, and modern art through an ecological lens. She is Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota and holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago, where her dissertation received the 2022 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Prior to joining eikones, Korola held fellowships at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Art Institute of Chicago (among others). She has published in the Journal of Visual Culture,Representations, Photographica, Transbordeur, and Feminist Media Histories and is curator of the recent exhibition Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection (2022) at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. In addition to her scholarly work, Korola is also an amateur photographer who enjoys experimenting with historical and alternative processes.

As a NOMIS Fellow, Korola will complete her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of the air—and air pollution—as a photographic problem. Foregrounding the materiality of both the photographic object and the air around it, the book examines how photographic professionals grappled with smoke, dust, and smog of the industrial atmosphere, from the manufacture of photographic materials to the preparation of the final print. An excerpt from this project has appeared in Representations as “The Air of Objectivity: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry” and received the 2023 Emerging Scholars Publication Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.

Concurrently, Korola will also start a second book project, provisionally titled Heliotropic Media: A Botanical History of Photography. Building on her first book’s concern with the sensitivity of the photographic medium, this project traces the intertwined histories of botany and photochemistry from the nineteenth century to the present. Over the year, Korola will develop a chapter on the botanical photograms of Bertha Günther, a dancer, gymnast, and physical educator of the Loheland School, best known as the woman who introduced László Moholy-Nagy to the possibilities of cameraless photography.