Angela Zito

Angela Zito http://www.angelazito.com/ teaches anthropology and religious studies at NYU where she also co-directs the Center for Religion and Media http://www.crmnyu.org/ and makes art in nooks and crannies. She studies embodied life and ritual in many of their mediated forms, including film and especially in China. Her most recent fieldwork is in Beijing on how public space results as people create community while collaborating on cultural expression. Her documentary Writing in Water, about the social life of calligraphy as a form of enculturated embodiment, was finished this year.

Zito has published DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Editor (with Zhang Zhen). University of Hawaii Press, 2015. Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Body, Subject and Power in China. Editor (with Tani Barlow). University of Chicago Press, 1994. “Crossing Cameras in China: Christian aesthetics and realized fictions.” In Zhang and Zito, DV-Made China. University of Hawaii Press, 2015. “Writing in Water, or, evanescence, enchantment and ethnography in a Chinese urban park.” Visual Anthropology Review 30.1 (2014): 11-22. “Reading as watching: What we see and what we get in the journal’s images.”  positions: asia critique “Twenty Years After” 20:1 (Winter 2012):  241-266. “Body” in Material Religion 7.1 (March 2011). “Secularizing the pain of footbinding: Missionary and medical stagings of the universal body.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.1 (March 2007): 1-24. “Culture,” in David Morgan, ed. Keywords in Religion, Media and Culture. Routledge Press, 2008. “Can television mediate religious experience? The theology of Joan of Arcadia” in Hent DeVries, ed. Religion: Beyond a concept. Fordham University Press, 2007. pp 724-738.