Dene Grigar is a digital artist and scholar based in

Vancouver, Washington Vancouver is a city on the north bank of the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, located in Clark County. Incorporated in 1857, Vancouver has a population of 190,915 as of the 2020 census, making it the fourth-largest city in Was ...

. She was the President of the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

from 2013 to 2019. In 2016, Grigar received the International Digital Media and Arts Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early life and career

Dene Grigar married John Barber. Her mother is from what was then Czechoslovakia.

Scholarship

Grigar is Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at

Washington State University Vancouver Washington State University Vancouver also known as WSU Vancouver is a campus of Washington State University. WSU Vancouver is located on a campus outside of Vancouver, Washington, approximately eight miles (13 km) north of the Columbia Riv ...

. Her scholarship is largely focused on

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...

, and has appeared in journals like ''Computers and Composition'' and ''Technoculture.'' She co-authored ''Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing'' (

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

2017) with Stuart Moulthrop. The book was a product of a 2013

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

(NEH) Startup Grant. Grigar's scholarly interests can be traced back to the early 1990s, when she took a class with Nancy Kaplan. Grigar has done extensive work curating exhibitions of digital art and electronic literature, including for the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

and

Modern Language Association The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language Association (MLA), is widely considered the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature. The MLA aims to "st ...

. Grigar helped lead the ELO repository in 2018, which was funded in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Grigar is now curating and editing the NeXt, an online digital museum and library, which presents preserved and emulated works of digital art and writing. Grigar was a member of the Kairos editorial board.

Works

Grigar co edited a volume of essays, ''Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices. ''This work collates essays on the state of electronic literature in 2021.

Essays

Grigar's essays mainly concern pedagogy and archiving aspects of electronic literature. * ''Defending your life in MOOspace: A report from the electronic edge,'' 1997 with John Barbar (presented at the Thirteenth Computers and Writing Conference, 1997) * ''Over the line, online, gender lines: Email and women in the classroom, ''1999. * ''On Chance and Change and the Paths on Which They Take Us,'' 2006 * ''he Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project'', both published by the ''

Iowa Review ''The Iowa Review'' is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. History and profile Founded in 1970, ''Iowa Review'' is issued three times a year, during the months of April, August, and December. Origin ...

Web'' * ''Electronic literature: Where Is It''?, 2008. * ''Curating Electronic Literature as Critical and Scholarly Practice,'' 2014 * ''Born digital preservation of e-lit: a live internet traversal of Sarah Smith's King of Space,'' 2019 * ''The computer is not a tool to help us do whatever we do, it is what we do, it is the medium on which we work: Dene Grigar in conversation with Piotr Marecki,'' 2019 * ''Challenges to Archiving and Documenting Born-Digital Literature: What Scholars, Archivists, and Librarians Need to Know,'' 2021 (Grigar's chapter in ''Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices''.)

Electronic Literature and Artworks

Grigar has produced a number of multimodal artworks, including: *''Fallow Fields: A Story in Two Parts'' (2004) was published in ''The

Web'', *''When Ghosts Will Die'', a finalist in the 2006 ''Drunken Boat'' Panliterary Awards. *''24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project'' centers on a collection of 24 stories about life in an American city in the 21st Century and involves 140 characters or less delivered—that is, "tweeted"—on Twitter over a 24 hr. period. Launched on Friday, August 21, 2009. The work asked for other contributions, and over 85 stories were submitted by 25+ participants from five countries in that timeframe * ''Fort Vancouver Mobile'' project was funded by the

NEH The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

. This was a locative / mixed media effort that brings together a core team of 23 scholars, digital storytellers, new media producers, historians, and archaeologists to create location-aware nonfiction content for mobile phones to be used at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. * ''Curlew'', which was featured at the 2014 OLE.1 festival in

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

Books

''Traversals: A method of preservation for born-digital texts'', with Stuart Moulthrop, 2017 (includes ''The Many Faces of

Judy Malloy Judy Malloy (born Judith Ann Powers January 9, 1942) is a poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with ''Uncle Roger'' in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media litera ...

's Uncle Roger'')

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grigar, Dene Electronic literature writers Living people Washington State University faculty Artists from Washington (state) American multimedia artists Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women artists