Hannah Higgins - Biography

Biography

Higgins is a Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her B.A. in 1988 from Oberlin College, her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1990, and graduated with her Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Chicago. The daughter of Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, Higgins is married to Joe Reinstein, Head of Surrogates for the Obama presidential campaign, and has two children: Zoë and Nathalie. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, is a New York and Massachusetts-based intermedia artist.

Higgins's research examines various art historical subjects (visual, musical, computational and material) in terms of two philosophically and practically entwined terms, information and sensation. She is the author of a history of the Fluxus movement, Fluxus Experience, published in 2002 by the University of California Press. The Grid Book, her interdisciplinary history of this defining form in Western culture, was published by MIT Press in early 2009. With Douglas Kahn, Higgins co-edited an anthology of computer art (1960-1970) called Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art, published in 2012 by University of California Press.