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 in 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 can watch or listen to Dr. Fifi's infomercial, Feeling is Believing 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

• Plotting Personal Cartographies, Plot 田, June 4, 2025; Los Angeles, CA
• Retrocomputing Workshop, Kunsthalle Wien, March 1, 2025; Vienna, Austria

🍵 Buy me a matcha :)