Maja Manojlovic is a Lecturer and Faculty Advisor for Writing II Pedagogy at the UCLA Writing Programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA School of Theater, Film, and TV, specializing in phenomenology, aesthetics, and cultures of digital film and emerging media. Her research focuses on immersive and interactive media aesthetics and cultures.
She is currently working on a manuscript Interval/Interstice: The Aesthetics of Digital Cinema, where she considers how filmmakers in the early 2000s deploy digital tools to reimagine space-time in cinema, and how this affects our sensorium, affect, and sense-making. Her work on the aesthetics of XR environments deploys the concept of the intervallic/interstitial to delve deeper into the effects the technologies of VR/AR/MR have on our feeling and perception of the self and its relationship to the world.
Dr. Manojlovic teaches courses spanning from Trends in Multimedia Environments: Videogame Rhetoric and Design in the Professional Writing Minor to Emerging Media: XR Technologies, Immersive Environments, and Embodied Experience in the Digital Humanities Minor. She is also developing a course Trends in Multimedia Environments: Interactive and Immersive Environmental Storytelling.
She is currently putting into practice her experience from the 2018 Oculus Launch Pad program for VR developers, where she developed Reconnect! The Amazon Medicine Garden. This is a VR experience in support of the Amazon Yawanawá peoples’ efforts to preserve medicinal plants as a part of their natural and cultural environment. At UCLA, she is working on two VR projects. Tongva VR/AR aims to develop 3-D models of two indigenous Gabrielino/Tongva villages, and is supported by the UCLA Digital Research Accelerator. Scribe VR, is developing a VR writing app, and is supported by the UCLA Technology Development Group and Startup UCLA’s Faculty Innovation Fellows Program. She has also kick-started, and is a part of the UCLA XR Initiative core group.
Publications:
“Extended Reality (XR) Series: Interview with Maja Manojlovic.”
“Dream is Destiny: Waking Life and the Digital Aesthetics of the In-between.” In Waking Life: Kino zwischen Technik und Leben, edited by Lisa Åkervall, Adina Lauenburger, Sulgi Lie, Christian Tedjasukmana. Berlin: b_books, Spring 2016
“Cas 3-D podob: Dimenzionalna estetika casa in prostora v izkušnji sodobnih stereoskopskih 3-D filmov, prvi del” (“Time for 3-D: Dimensional Aesthetics of Time and Space in the Experience of Contemporary 3-D Cinema, Part One”). Ekran: Revija za film in televizijo (Screen: Magazine for Film and Television, November-December 2013)
“Demonlover: Interval, Affect and the Aesthetics of Digital Dislocation.” In Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices. Edited by Bruce Bennett, Mark Furstenau, Adrian Mackenzie, 142-156. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.