Sophie Hamacher is an artist, teacher, and curator whose work explores media histories, surveillance, and the politics of visuality. Working across film, video, printmaking, and text, she examines how technologies of seeing shape memory, perception, and our understanding of care and vulnerability. Her multidisciplinary practice draws on archival material, medical imaging, and experimental forms to consider how images both reveal and withhold meaning.
At Maine College of Art & Design, she has developed and taught courses including Art & Surveillance, Documentary: Theory & Practice, and Cinematic Borders: Migration, Surveillance, and the Politics of Crossing, each of which examines how media technologies intersect with power, representation, and global politics. In the MFA program, she has taught Studio IV and Thesis Preparation, guiding graduate students through research-driven, interdisciplinary artistic development. Her classes foreground collective learning, critical inquiry, and creative experimentation, sometimes integrating close analysis of images with hands-on making.
Hamacher is the editor of Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press, 2023), an anthology exploring how surveillance reshapes contemporary parental experience. Her writing has appeared in October, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Scapegoat. She runs the micro-cinema Flying Point Projects and completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Critical Studies.