Maja Manojlovic

Dr. Maja Manojlovic is a Lecturer and Faculty Advisor for Writing II Pedagogy at the UCLA Writing Programs. Her background is in Cinema and Media Studies, specializing in phenomenology, aesthetics, and cultures of digital film and emerging media. She has published on digital aesthetics in Demonlover, Waking Life, and more recently on the environmental documentary Honeyland. She is currently working on a manuscript titled, Interval/Interstice: The Aesthetics of Digital Cinema, where she considers how filmmakers in the early 2000s deploy digital tools to reimagine space-time in cinema, and how this affects our sensorium, affect, and sense-making. Her research on the aesthetics of XR environments deploys the concept of the intervallic/interstitial to delve deeper into how VR/AR technologies affect our feeling and perception of the self, and its relationship to the world. Dr. Manojlovic has presented this research at international conferences. Most recently, she presented her work on “The ‘Interworld’ and Embodied Experience in VR Environments,” at the 2019 Conference Besides the Screen, and “XR for Actionable Environmental Consciousness,” at the 2020 Conference Green Culture World.

Her research interests are reflected in both her teaching and XR projects. She teaches courses ranging from Videogame Rhetoric and Design in the Professional Writing Minor to XR Technologies, Aesthetics, and Design in the Digital Humanities Minor. She is developing several XR projects: Tongva VR/AR, supported by the UCLA Digital Research Accelerator in the 2019-2020; Scribe VR, a part of the campus-wide 2020 UCLA Faculty Innovation Fellowship Program; and The Amazon Medicine Garden, resulting from her participation in the 2018 Oculus Launch Pad bootcamp for VR developers. She is also a co-founder of the UCLA XR Initiative (https://x-reality.humspace.ucla.edu/), and an affiliate faculty of the UCLA Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). As a Faculty Advisor for WII pedagogy, Dr. Manojlovic is committed to the highest standards of academic writing instruction. Her teaching philosophy is rooted in inclusive, accessible, and student-centered pedagogy that supports diverse, poly-vocal, and anti-racist learning environments.