Mei-Ling Israel / Consortial

Graduate Student Researcher
August 2015 – December 2015misrael@gc.cuny.edu

Mei-Ling Israel is a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture. At the Graduate Center, she is a student in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program and a staff member at the LIS Center for income inequality research. She holds a BA from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature. Her research interests include material culture, ethnography, digital cultural heritage management, popular culture and media studies. Her dissertation explores the capacity of online interfaces for self-organization, extra-institutional learning, and the transmission of traditions. Mei-Ling is also a working kiln-formed glass artist, studying at Penland School of Crafts and Urban Glass. Prior to coming to BGC she published monographs in the fields of craft, immigrant culture, and contemporary art. She has presented her work at the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, the Paley Center for Media, the Hagley Museum & Library in Philadelphia, the American Popular Culture Association, the University of Alberta Material Culture Institute, and the National Conference for Education in the Ceramic Arts. At the completion of her doctorate Mei-Ling is looking forward to applying her research to the preservation of cultural heritage via digital media design.