Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, PhD

Welcome to my Web Site. I built it on neocities.org :)

I am a historian and practitioner of media art interested in the relationship between art, technology, gender, and disability. I received my Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago in 2023, with a dissertation titled “Vera Molnar’s Programmed Abstraction: Computer Graphics and Geometric Abstract Art in Postwar Europe.” I am working on publishing my dissertation as a book. I spent the 2023-24 academic year as a postdoctoral scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute. I am based in Los Angeles and am an Assistant Professor of Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California.

I was the July 2026 Artist in Residence at LATITUDE Chicago, culminating in a solo show at Latitude Gallery, "Intuitive Imaging Industries." This installation staged the office of Dr. Fifi Robinson, a fictional holistic healer and inventor of the Intuitive Imaging Instrument™️, a speculative medical imaging instrument that can "see" any ailment. I originally developed this project in the Leonardo CripTech AI Lab, a fellowship for disabled artists critiquing, reimagining, and (re)building AI models. You watch Dr. Fifi's infomercial, Feeling is Believing, below, or listen to the radio version (audio only) in the virtual exhibition "Slow AI," curated by M Eilo.

Here's a picture of me and my service dog, Bob Ross, taken by Cassia Davis at the Getty Center in 2024:

art

My portfolio site is under construction.

With Clara Venice, I am one-half of Soft Reset, an audiovisual project offering a gentle, human-made alternative to algorithmic wellness audio.

selected writing

• Still Life of the Cosmos: Casey Reas, Ex Nihilo, Feral File, March 2026
• The Best PST Art-Science Shows Work Against Today’s Obsession with “Innovation” Art in America, Winter 2024
• Between the Lines: The Art of Vera Molnar Artforum, May 2024, cover story
• “Toward a Science of Art: Visual Research in Europe,” in Electric Op, edited by Tina Rivers Ryan. Buffalo, NY/London: Buffalo AKG Art Museum/Giles, 2024
• “Herstory or mine? Writing feminist histories of art with self-mythologies in mind” in Theorising the Artist Interview, edited by Lucia Farinati and Jennifer Thatcher (Routledge, 2024). I also contributed the cover image :)
• Dr Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on 'CIRCLES, BLOBS, RIPPLES' by Zachary Lieberman at Unit London, February 6, 2024.
• “Screenshots from the 1970s: Vera Molnar’s Experiments in Interactive Computing” in NEW MEDIA IN ART HIST0RY // TENSIONS, EXCHANGES, SITUATIONS, edited by Melissa Rérat, Régine Bonnefoit, and Samuel Schellenberg. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
• "Handwriting in the Keyboarding Age," Outland, September 12, 2023.
• "Vera Molnar: Weaving Variations," HOLO: Emerging Trajectories in Art, Science and Technology, 2022.
• Feeling into Paula Dawson's Holograms,"Art Journal, Spring 2022.
• "Keeping up with Crypto Lingo," Right Click Save, inaugural issue, January 31, 2022.

conversations with artists

• "Well Wishes: In the Studio with Shana Moulton," Art in America Spring 2025: The Wellness Issue.
• "An Interview with Vera Molnar," Right Click Save, August 26, 2022. Reprinted in Right Click Save: The New Digital Art Community, edited by Alex Estorick (Berlin: Vetro Editions, 2024).
• "fxhash | the artists," Right Click Save, May 12, 2022.
• Speaking of Art: Artist Interviews in Scholarship and Practice (2018-2022), archived with Knowledge@UChicago (recordings available only to on-campus users at the University of Chicago Library).

talks and interviews

• “A Conversational Method: Vera Molnár’s Experiments in Mainframe Computing,” keynote at the Radical Software Symposium, Kunsthalle Wien, February 28, 2025.
• "Creative Misuse," Alumna profile by Chandler Calderon for Tableau, Fall 2024.
• "Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on the Legacy of Computer Artist Vera Molnar," Artforum: Under the Cover, May 29, 2024.
• “Vera Molnar rajzgépei (Vera Molnar’s drawing machines),” invited lecture (in Hungarian) at Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest, on April 4, 2024, in conjunction with the exhibition À la recherche de Vera Molnar.

workshops

• Emotional Tech Support with Soft Reset, July 31, 2026; Chicago, IL
• Stretch Yourself: Drawing with Oscilloscopes and Historic Computers, Benton Museum of Art, September 19, 2025; Claremont, CA
• Plotting Personal Cartographies, Plot 田, June 4, 2025; Los Angeles, CA
• Retrocomputing Workshop, Kunsthalle Wien, March 1, 2025; Vienna, Austria

🍵 Buy me a matcha :)