MATT MOTTELArtist · Performer · ArchivistEarlier projects
Matthew Mottel / educator
Teaching / Professional practice
College teaching in digital art, sound, moving image and media culture.
The classroom must function as a site of collective recalibration: a place where students learn not only how to make, but how to listen, question, and imagine with integrity.
I teach at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Kean Jersey City, formerly New Jersey City University. My classes move between technical workshops, cultural history, artistic research and the work students bring from their own lives.
featured course / theory in the classroom
Media in American Society
Who makes a public image, who owns it, and how do we read it?
A course grounded in theory: media as environment, representation, ownership, public broadcasting and collective practice. William Greaves, Black Journal and experimental media bring these ideas into encounters with particular works.
The ethics of media-making — what we choose to amplify, how we frame the world, and whose perspectives we honor — is as essential as the techniques we practice.
Many of my students come from working-class backgrounds. They arrive fluent in the immediacy of digital culture, but may not yet have encountered the independent subcultures and experimental art that have shaped my own life. I meet students where they are, using image-making, sound and text to expand what they believe is possible.
The city is our classroom
In New Surroundings; New Views, students photograph their city as a stage. A gallery visit begins before they reach the gallery: on the street, in the sky, on the ground. They bring those observations back into the studio, pairing photographs with handwritten captions and haikus.
The resulting zine joins analog and digital practice. It gives students a form they can publish themselves, and asks them to consider how an environment shapes what they see. Their own surroundings are material worth looking at.
Teaching as improvisation
I see teaching as a form of improvisation — listening deeply, responding to what emerges, and allowing students to steer the direction of discovery. My approach is conversational and collaborative.
Workshops, screenings and peer critique keep the technical and conceptual work in conversation. A student learns an editing tool, tries it on their own material, shows the result, and returns to the work with a different understanding of what it can do. At its best, education is not about mastery, but mutual awakening.
My college teaching grows alongside work with archives, independent music, artist-run spaces and public media. Related projects bring these questions into other settings.
