Lori Landay, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston, is a new media artist and interdisciplinary scholar exploring the making of visual meaning in twentieth- and twenty first-century American culture. She teaches interdisciplinary courses such as "Approaches to Visual Culture," "Digital Narrative," "Artistry, Creativity, and Inquiry," "The Jazz Age" and "The Nature of Technology" in the Liberal Arts Department, and "The Language of Film" in the Film Scoring Department. She directs the interdisciplinary minor in Visual Culture and Interactive Media.

She is the author of two books: I Love Lucy (published in the TV Milestones Series by Wayne State University Press, 2010) and Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). She has also published journal articles, book chapters, and multimedia online journal pieces on other aspects of film and television comedy, silent film, and new media technologies. She is the writer, director, and editor of the documentary film The Jazz Age Gaze: Looking at the Flapper Film, numerous "machinima" digital videos available on vimeo.com and youtube, as well as the creator of virtual art installations and other digital art. She is also L1Aura Loire in the virtual world Second Life.

In addition to her teaching commitments, Professor Landay serves as Coordinator of Technology in Learning and Teaching (TiLT) for the Liberal Arts Department. She also drives technology initiatives at the college as co-founder of the ReBoot program of workshops and institutes on teaching with technology for Berklee faculty and a member of the BTOT (Berklee Teachers on Teaching) conference planning committee. She also brings her expertise in technology and other aspects of education to her work in curriculum review and design. Professor Landay has quickly established herself as an incredible resource for faculty at the college, sharing imaginative and effective ways for using technology in the classroom, and modeling interdisciplinary and cultural approaches to inquiry.

For her imaginative and innovative teaching, and dedicated and passionate work, Professor Lori Landay was selected as the Chief Marshal for the Berklee College of Music 2006 Commencement. In 2007, she was awarded the Professional Education Division's prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2008, she was selected as one of the two inaugural recipients of the Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship for her innovative project, "Virtual Worlds." For the academic year 2008-09, she was on sabbatical, engaged in her project, "Sharpening the Cutting Edge: What's New in New Media?"

Some of the outcomes of that project include learning how to make machinima (digital video captured in real time in a virtual world or other 3-d game environment), virtual art exhibitions (see: "Somebody" and "The Future of Virtual Subjectivity, or From the Gloom Meteor", and and Dr. Landay and her "avatar," L1Aura Loire, welcomed the entering students at the Berklee Spring Convocation 2010 (see below). Her video, "CLICK: Interactive and Immersive Virtual Art" won a Special Award for Best Crossover Impact in the University of Western Australia's Machinima II Art of the Artists Contest.