Artist and New Faculty Member Curry J. Hackett Joins NYU MCC

The MCC MediaLab chatted with Clinical Assistant Professor Curry J. Hackett who joined the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in Fall 2025. We've reprinted with permission an excerpt of their conversation below.

How did you get into doing practice-based work?

I’m trained in architecture and urban design, and my first job out of undergrad was working on a multi-billion dollar stormwater management project in Washington, DC. Interestingly—because of how much of the city the project impacted—it became the first project where I began to think of cities as networks of data, resources, cultures, and people.

I left that first position to freelance full-time, working with the city to design several permanent public art projects, offering communication design services to infrastructural projects, and eventually produce multimedia art and gallery installations.

A gallery featuring a collection of AI-generated visual and archival media framed by tobacco leaves. — *So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia* at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

We’ve seen some of your amazing work in design and installation. Could you share a couple of recent or favorite projects with us?

I recently produced an installation at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as one of the 25 contributions to the “Making Home” Smithsonian Design Triennial. The room featured a collection of AI-assisted textiles and archival media, framed by a layered curtain of 250 pounds of tobacco leaves. The installation, “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia”, was a love letter to my family’s farmland in Prospect, Virginia. It reflected on my past and future relationship to the land that we’ve owned since the 1800s.”

I also really enjoyed "Ugly Beauties," which was installed in downtown Brooklyn last spring. It was my first major work in New York City. I produced a 50-foot-long collage, comprised of several AI-generated images. The fictional scene put Black folks in dialogue with the wild plants that flourish in New York, prompting viewers to consider society’s perception of beauty and belonging. That project was a wonderful collaboration with the Van Alen Institute and the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership: two organizations working to surface the work of emerging designers and test new strategies to bring people together in public space.

An art installation of large pictures on a wall is shown between high rises on a city street. — Installed at The Plaza at 300 Ashland, *Ugly Beauties* was a panoramic display of AI-generated images of people juxtaposed with various native and invasive plant species—so-called “weeds”—that flourish in New York City. *Photo by Cameron Blaylock*

What kinds of classes will you be teaching here, and what can students expect from your classroom?

This semester, I'm teaching two courses, both of which I’m excited about. Methods in Media Studies is a foundational course for all MCC students where we’ll learn practice-based skills such as photo editing, data visualization, and video editing.

The second is New Media Research Studio, another practice-based course, where we’re looking at how public space stages various patterns of media production and consumption. We’ll analyze and narrate those patterns in the form of zines, and “vibe code” our way through a set of apps inspired from our findings from the midterm. In any course I teach, I really try to cultivate a safe, rigorous, playful learning environment, where both individual and collective voices are uplifted. Black media and cultural theory tend to play a major role as well, to get us thinking critically about the politics, geographies, and histories that shape how we all show up in the world.