Laura U. Marks is fascinated with interstitial spaces as sites for the exchange of embodied knowledge—both in her focus on intercultural art and cinema and in the unorthodox way that she thinks with, rather than about, her subjects.

Her exploration of aesthetic landscapes largely untraveled in academic literature weaves through cinema studies, art history, phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cognitive sciences and quantum physics, arriving at stunningly original conceptions of embodiment, materiality, film experience, and multisensorality. These interdisciplinary forays into the movement of art, meanings and people between cultures offer a transnational mode of scholarship that reflects Canada’s multicultural diversity.

“The fields I work in are vibrating with potential for new discoveries and exciting recombinations,” says Marks. “Delving into the history of Islamic philosophy, for example, I find so many concepts that resonate with ‘Western’ philosophy and speak to our contemporary experience.”

Drawing on the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, and the fields of anthropology and neuroscience, her work demonstrates how audiences experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture through what she terms “haptic visuality.” She describes how seeing can function like the sense of touch, bringing viewers into contact with film in a way that engages bodily empathy. Her theory of visuality has been credited as one of the major concepts of the embodied turn in cinema and media studies, and has led to a redefinition of aesthetic scholarship that has broadly influenced cognate disciplines.

Marks is the author of four books and numerous articles which weave together a decade of developments in non-mainstream media art to “restore a flow between the haptic and the optical that our culture is currently lacking”. Her writings draw on almost two hundred film and video works to unfold the political, social, cultural, economic, and historical contexts of independent and experimental Arab cinema over 25 years. This is a singular contribution to the academic literature in this area.

Marks’s popular articles and artistic programming have brought international attention to numerous independent filmmakers and artists, many of them Canadian. In focusing on non-commercial works made by immigrants and diaspora, she is an ambassador of Canada’s approach to multiculturalism. “The intercultural focus of my work invites people to feel the common interests between cultures that are usually thought of as separate,” she notes.

Adds Marks, “I am motivated by curiosity, pleasure, and the desire to share. By discovering and sharing fascinating and beautiful works that haven’t received much attention, we can learn so much about how artists and programmers build environments that sustain creativity.”