Dr. Charissa N. Terranova

Mrs. Nancy B. Hamon made the donation to create the endowment for the Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair of Art and Aesthetic Studies in April 2004. The chair was created to support the scholarly, educational and research activities of an internationally recognized scholar in the area of art and aesthetic studies.

Dr. Charissa N. Terranova is an environmental humanist researcher who is reframing art, architecture and science, specifically where these areas overlap and how they affect each other. She is particularly interested in the role of nature and biology in past and present art and design.

“I’m not an artist,” she explained. “I’m more of an enabler of artists.”

Terranova has broken ground on evolving areas of study that impact artists, scientists and designers, such as the Anthropocene Epoch, the unit of geologic time that defines human-driven climate change; organicism, the use of literary or artistic forms in which the parts are connected in the whole; and epigenetics, the study of how the environment and other factors can change the way in which genes are expressed.

Terranova has written five books related to the connection of art and science. Her upcoming book, Organic Modernism: From the British Bauhaus to Cybernetics, follows the thread of philosophical organicism in the 20th century through a host of manifestations in the United Kingdom, including modern architecture, surrealism, socialism, the welfare state, epigenetics, biology-based art exhibitions, robotic art and design, cybernetics, and ecology in art.

“Biology, in part, comes out of romanticism, travels and, more precisely, the observation of nature,” said Terranova. “That is, looking very carefully, using your aesthetic perception, your body, and your senses to understand the natural world.”

In addition to writing books, Terranova frequently speaks, writes articles and essays, and develops exhibitions. One such event held at UT Dallas in 2022, The Visual Cultures of Race and Science, explored how the language and images of the natural sciences shaped and substantiated ideological and inaccurate ideas about race.

She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in understanding art, contemporary art, organic modernism and new media art histories, among others.

Terranova joined UT Dallas in 2007 as an assistant professor of aesthetic studies and founding director of Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency. She previously had been an assistant professor of art history at Southern Methodist University and a visiting assistant professor of architecture at The University of British Columbia.

Terranova earned a PhD in architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism from Harvard University in 2004; a Master of Arts in architectural history and theory from Harvard in 2001; a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1996; and a Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.