About

Brooke Belisle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, where she researches and teaches the comparative history and theory of media aesthetics. Her work focuses on the recurrent disruptions and possibilities of 'new media,' exploring emergent formats and experimental practices that echo across different periods of technological and social transformation. She is particularly interested in the history and theory of photography, cinema, digital media, media art, media archaeology, immersion and interactivity, critical theory, phenomenology, 19th-century visual culture, and the visual cultures of science. Belisle completed her PhD at UC Berkeley in Rhetoric with additional emphases in Film and New Media, holds a master’s degree in digital media from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University. She is the Graduate Program Director for Stony Brook’s MA and PhD in Art History, directs the interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Media, Art, Culture, and Technology, and is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Her research includes examining the phenomenological and media-archeological aspects of media, relating A.I.-driven computational imaging techniques to early photographic spatial strategies, and investigating how the limits of the visible world have been recast through changing techniques and aesthetics of astronomical imaging. Her publications and recent work are accessible through her academia.edu page and otherlandscapes.com. Belisle’s work has been supported by various research fellowships from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, The Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Stony Brook Trustees Faculty Award. She has served on the board of the Journal of Visual Culture, was formerly an editor there, and has held leadership roles within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the Modern Language Association.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Visual arts
• Human–computer interaction
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Political Science
• Social psychology
• Geology
• Mathematics
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• AI and Photography: An Interview with Brooke Belisle

  Photography and Culture · 2025-04-25

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Co-intelligent classrooms: Developing custom AI agents for responsible AI in education

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-10-01

  article

  As Artificial Intelligence plays a growing role in education, students too often turn to it as a substitute for independent work rather than as a tool to support their learning. In our study, we developed custom AI agents that students in several courses could interact with as learning tools for specific topics. Topics included undergraduate physics, signal processing and filtering, and the physics of sound. Our agents were developed using curated, course-specific datasets and following ethical guidelines for educational AI use. We compared how agents made with different AI platforms (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude.ai) performed across three criteria: creator usability, accuracy of responses, and effectiveness of responsible AI guardrails. Student evaluators assessed each AI agent's strengths and weaknesses through logged interactions with a custom interface. Our process offers a model that could be replicated by educators across multiple disciplines who are interested in responsible ways AI could support student learning in their courses.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Critical Response I:</i> Photography and AI: Why It Matters, Though

  Critical Inquiry · 2024-12-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Dimensional Aesthetics

  2023-12-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2. Surfacing Subjectivity: Portrait Mode and Computational Photography

  2023-12-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Depth Effects

  2023-11-17 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. The Sidedness of Things: Object Recognition and Computer Vision

  2023-12-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3. Visible World: Photographic Maps and Computational Photogrammetry

  2023-12-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A History of Presence.

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The article explores the history of immersive media, connecting those technologies to today's endeavors in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The author suggests these experiences are trying to offer the of presence. Past devices discussed include the stereograph, magic lanterns, stereoscopes and panoramic paintings. The physicist and artist Lloyd Cross, who had his first exhibition of holograms at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1969 and is known for emancipating holography from the military industrial complex, is also discussed.

  Publisher

• From Stereoscopic Depth to Deep Learning

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2021 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Geology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Roquet

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Anya Ventura

  1 shared

• Josie Thaddeus-Johns

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• American Council of Learned Societies fellowship
• The Getty Foundation fellowship
• National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship
• Stony Brook Trustees Faculty Award