Andrew Niess

I am an audio-visual researcher based in Philadelphia. Impelled by the urgency of contemporary ecological crises, I make research that highlights their disorienting exigencies. I communicate this research through forms that invite embodied engagements from a wide range of audiences. In my dissertation, for example, I am designing and building new instruments that link one’s breath to audio-visual archives of Pennsylvania waste sites. My modular dissertation project can in turns be read, played, breathed, heard, and viewed.

My published writing is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, and in a Routledge collection on “eco-pedagogies.” You can view my film, Particulate Matters, about the afterlives of asbestos waste and environmental racism in Ambler, Pa., and my PNEUMATOGRAPHY series at andrewniess.com.