Prof. Hava Aldouby is head of the Art History program in the Department of Language, Literature, and the Arts. She is also the artistic director of the Open University DHSS Media Art Gallery. Her research focuses on contemporary moving image and media art, with a particular focus on skin, haptic visuality, and migratory aesthetics. Beyond phenomenological art theory, she has been involved in the growing field of experimental aesthetics, collaborating with neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese and with VR scientists Doron Friedman and Béatrice Hasler to investigate the concept of haptic aesthetics in the virtual art gallery. Her monograph The European Canon and Contemporary Artists' Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan) is forthcoming. Her publications include a monograph, Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film (University of Toronto Press, 2013), which explores painting and the moving image; the edited volume Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy and Agency in 21st-Century Media Arts (Leuven University Press, 2020); several journal papers and book chapters; and a guest-edited volume of ARTS on Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art (2019). She is currently investigating aesthetic patterns in the experimental cinema of Jewish American filmmakers during the era of American avant-garde films (1960s-1980s). In this project she has chosen to use DH methods for image analysis, opting to forge a method for quantitative and qualitative analysis of particular formal traits in these filmmakers' oeuvres.
Prof. Aldouby envisions the Open University DHSS Media Art Gallery as a research platform dedicated to the investigation of Israeli media art, with occasional representation by international artists. The gallery's exhibition projects have included Loukia Alavanou: Green Room, which presented immersive video art by the Athens-based artist Loukia Alavanou, and AI-based moving image installations by Israeli artists Tom Porat and Oren Eliav. The 2025 exhibition program will be dedicated to diverse dialogues between Israeli artists and generative AI.