Andrew Culp (PhD, The Ohio State University, 2013), serves as the Director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at CalArts, where he teaches Media History and Theory in the School of Critical Studies.
Culp’s work intersects media, technology, politics, and philosophy in journals such as Radical Philosophy, parallax, symplokē, and boundary 2 online. He has contributed to various books and actively engages contemporary thought through interviews, essays, and dialogues.
His first book, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), offers a new, revolutionary understanding of Gilles Deleuze’s thought, adapting it to our media-saturated era. It has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Japanese, German, Greek, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Persian.
In A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (University of Minnesota Press, March 2022), he challenges conventional political thinking. He creatively explores guerrilla warfare, anarchist infowar, queer outlaws, and black insurgency, providing insight into political movements that reject traditional labels and solutions.
His newest manuscript is a withering critique of power across an interdisciplinary archive of cybernetic governance, biopolitical membranes, clockwork states, and other deformations of sovereignty.
As a member of The Destructionist International, he creates film and other media. He is co-director and co-writer of Machines in Flames (2022, 50 min), he uncovers a secret history of computational destruction in 1980s Toulouse. It has been screened more than 90 times across the globe. Additional DI work includes a film manifesto, interviews, and a short on train theft in Los Angeles, Breached (2024, 15 min).
He recently made a limited series podcast called Being & Event with Alexander Galloway, a section-by-section discussion of the book by Alain Badiou, was the season host of the peer reviewed Cultural Studies Association podcast Positions, and has been convening two reading series’ for The Public School Los Angeles (The Ultra Contemporary and A Thousand Plateaus Page-By-Page).
Classes he has taught at CalArts include graduate seminars in Contemporary Political Thought, Contemporary Aesthetic Theory, and Thesis Writing, elective courses in Feminist Surveillance Studies, Another End of the World is Possible, and undergraduate courses in Cyberpunk, Evil Media, and Introduction to Radical Politics.
He mentors students working at the intersection of radical critique, comparative media/medium, digital studies, interventionist aesthetics, cultural theory (especially race, gender, and sexuality), and anarchist/Marxist thought.
