Monica Lee Steinberg received a PhD in Art History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joining HKU as an assistant professor in 2019. She teaches classes on modern and contemporary art as it intersects with technology, law, and the market, and student assignments frequently involve the realization of creative projects.

Dr. Steinberg’s research considers art, new media, and law of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a specific focus on fictional attribution, crime, and humor in a global context.

Her writing has appeared in journals including but not limited to: Crime, Media, Culture | Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art | Grey Room | Art Journal | Art History | American Art | Oxford Art Journal | Archives of American Art Journal.

She has also contributed to exhibition catalogues such as: The University of Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum’s Defaced! Money, Conflict, Protest | The Venice Biennale’s Love Me, Love Me Not: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and its Neighbours | Yarat Contemporary Art Space’s The Commonist | The Imago Mundi Collection’s Azerbaijan: The colors of wind and fire | The National Academy’s The Abstract Impulse: Fifty Years of Abstraction at the National Academy, 1956-2006.

Her book, Lives of the Imaginary Artists in Cold War California, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (2025). Six chapters trace the pseudonymously attributed artworks, (auto)biografictions, and humorous events realized by a cadre of practitioners (both actual and imaginary) playfully frustrating the telling of history itself. If an artist is imaginary, whose self-expression is on display? And how can an imaginary artist write an autobiography, paint a portrait or self-portrait, or have a (very real) retrospective exhibition?

For a list of publications, digital humanities projects, and other endeavors, see: https://msteinberg.art/

Postgraduate Supervision

MS Anqi Li, PhD Candidate (2021–2025),

https://anqi-li.com/

KE Projects

2023 Puzzlee (https://puzzlee.art/). Realized in collaboration with Gabriel Getzie. Art tile-flipping game.

2022 Art Wars (https://artwars.art/). Realized in collaboration with Gabriel Getzie; Avatars by Pinky Yuen; Design by Taylor Lovell. A simulated art market.

2021 Expensive Taste (https://expensivetaste.art/). Realized in collaboration with Gabriel Getzie. Historic auction data transformed into a “this or that” game.

2021 Roadside Photography (https://roadside.photography/). Realized in collaboration with Gabriel Getzie. Interactive map of 11,710 photographs by architectural critic John Margolies.

2020 AskRedditButAI (https://askredditbut.ai/). Realized in collaboration with Gabriel Getzie. Vote (up or down) questions generated by a GPT-2 model trained on over 7,000 AskReddit Posts.