Jonathan Crary received his Ph.D. from Columbia 1987 having previously graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College, where he was an art history major. He also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he majored in film/photography. He has taught full-time at Columbia since 1989, and has also been a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He has written widely on contemporary art and culture for publications and has also written critical essays for over 25 exhibition catalogs. In 1986 he was one of the founders (and continues to be co-editor) of Zone Books, a press now internationally noted for its publications in intellectual history, art theory, politics, anthropology and philosophy. Amongst other titles, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990) which has been translated into eight foreign languages. His book Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture was published in 2000 and was the winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.
In 2006, Jonathan Crary was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context of the seminar Another visuality. Discourse of display / display of discourse. This lecture was entitled 'On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a 24/7 World.'
