Dene (Rudyne)[1] Grigar is a digital artist and scholar based in Vancouver, Washington. She was the President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013 to 2019.[2] In 2016, Grigar received the International Digital Media and Arts Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.[3]
Dene Grigar married John Barber.[4] Her mother is from what was then Czechoslovakia.[5]
Her interest in electronic literature began in Fall 1991 when she took a graduate course with Nancy Kaplan in hypertext.[6]
She is currently the Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver.[7]
Grigar is Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver.[8] Her scholarship is largely focused on electronic literature, and has appeared in journals like Computers and Composition[9] and Technoculture.[10] She co-authored Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing (MIT Press 2017) with Stuart Moulthrop.[11] The book was a product of a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Startup Grant.[12] Grigar's scholarly interests can be traced back to the early 1990s, when she took a class with Nancy Kaplan.[13]
Grigar co edited a volume of essays, Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices. This work collates essays on the state of electronic literature in 2021. Source:[14]
Grigar's essays mainly concern pedagogy and archiving aspects of electronic literature.
Grigar has produced a number of multimodal artworks, including:
Traversals: A method of preservation for born-digital texts, with Stuart Moulthrop, 2017[25] (includes The Many Faces of Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger)
The Challenges of Born-Digital Fiction: Editions, Translations, and Emulations with Mariusz Pisarski, 2024 is a work that straddles both print and online multimedia aspects to explain how the Electronic Literature Lab preserved and emulated Judy Malloy’s its name was Penelope, produced on Eastgate Systems' Storyspace platform, and John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse and Stuart Moultrop’s Hyperbola: A Digital Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow and Dreamtime, both created with HyperCard. [26][27]
Dene Grigar's 1997 Nouspace Gallery and Media Lounge was a MOO that "offered a place to continue thinking about what it means to live and work online and how one best interacts with and presents multimedia on the web." as Marjorie Luesebrink described in #WomenTechLit as a landmark innovation [28]
Grigar developed The NEXT Museum, Library, and Preservation Space as a digital exhibition and archival space, and has curated many exhibits.Her essays provide a history and explanation of challenges inherent in exhibiting born-digital works.[29][30]
At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2012 Convention, Dene Grigar, Lori Emerson, and Kathi Inman Barnes put on an "Electronic Literature Exhibit".[31][6]
She worked with Kathi Inman Barnes to curate "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" as an exhibition in the Library of Congress in 2013. This exhibit featured 27 works of born-digital literature, accompanied by 69 print books.[32] [33][34][35][36]
Grigar has done extensive work curating exhibitions of digital art and electronic literature, including for the Library of Congress[37] and Modern Language Association.[38] Grigar helped lead the ELO repository in 2018. Grigar is now curating and editing the NeXt, an online digital museum and library, which presents preserved and emulated works of digital art and writing.[39]
Grigar has successfully received and executed grants for many projects, including:
Dene Grigar was president of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013[44] to 2019.[45] James O'Sullivan in his opening remarks for the 2019 ELO conference in Cork, Ireland, remarked that "there is a generation of artistic endeavour which would have been lost had it not been for Dene Grigar. But most importantly, she has overseen the rise of a new generation of scholars and practitioners who will always see her as their president."[46]