David Stephenson

Brief description

Associate Professor David Stephenson
David Stephenson's teaching interests include contemporary and historical perspectives on art, and particularly photographic practice and theory. He is the principal supervisor for photography students in the BFA Honours, Masters by Coursework, and MFA and PhD programmes.
Career Summary
David Stephenson studied at the University of Colorado and then the University of New Mexico, completing an MFA in photography in 1982. He was appointed to the University of Tasmania in 1982, and headed the photography program between 1984 and 2006. His photographs have been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1993), the National Gallery of Victoria (1998), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (2001). His work is represented in many private and public collections both in Australia and overseas including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Research Interests
A fascination for the aesthetics of the sublime has led David Stephenson to travel and photograph extensively around the world, with journeys to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. While the contested human value systems associated with wilderness and natural environment have constituted the background for much of his work, over the past ten years he has also been involved in an investigation of the architecture of transcendence, and its representation through both traditional photography and temporal digital media. David's monograph on this subject, Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture, was published in 2005 by Princeton Architectural Press, New York.