Laura A. Frahm is Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Her work explores film and media through the lens of architecture, design, spatial theory, ecological thought, and process philosophy. She has published numerous articles as well as three books: Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2022), Jenseits des Raums: Filmische Topologien des Urbanen (Beyond Space: Cinematic Topologies of the Urban, Transcript, 2010), Bewegte Räume: Raumkonstruktionen in Videoclips von Jonathan Glazer, Chris Cunningham, Mark Romanek, and Michel Gondry (Moving Spaces: Spatial Configurations in Music Videos by Jonathan Glazer, Chris Cunningham, Mark Romanek, and Michel Gondry, Peter Lang, 2007). She also co-edited the volume Einführung in die Medienkulturwissenschaft (Introduction to Media Cultural Studies, Lit Verlag, 2005) and serves as co-editor of the book series Urbane Welten: Texte zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Stadtforschung (Cityscapes: Texts in Cultural Urban Studies, Transcript, 2008–present).

From 2008–2012 she was postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2008. From 2005–2007 she was doctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program Berlin | New York “History and Culture of the Metropolis in the 20th Century,” including fellowships at Columbia University and New York University. She received her academic training in Theater, Film, and Television Studies, History of Art, and Romance Languages / Spanish at the University of Cologne, with a study abroad at the Universidad de Málaga.

Her recent book, Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2022), was longlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Moving Images. It offers a history of film experiments and material practices with celluloid at the Bauhaus that configure film as a malleable, adaptable “polymedium.” She is currently working on two new book manuscripts: Living Architectures: Ecology After the Bauhaus, which traces the intertwined history of ecological thought, organic design, and media experiments in the (post-)Bauhaus years; and The Co-Creators: Women, Art, and Ecology, which studies how women artists at mid-century engaged with ecological thought and fostered new modes of co-creation.