Anna Novakov

Anna Novakov is a writer and cultural critic whose most recent book, Imagine Utopias in the Built Environment: From London’s Vauxhall Garden to the Black Rock Desert was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017. The daughter of noted environmental physicist Tihomir Novakov, she was immersed in the Ecotopian dreams of air pollution control from an early age. She was raised in both the Socialist Utopia of post-war Yugoslavia and the free speech, counterculture movement of Berkeley, California. Both radical movements had profound influences on women’s rights, new technology and the built environment – areas of study that would form the basis of Novakov’s creative practice. In 1992, after completing her doctorate at New York University, she came to prominence in Manhattan as one of the first art critics to write about the interrelationship between art, technology and Utopian spaces. The author of dozens of books, exhibition catalogues, magazine and newspaper articles, Novakov lives in Berkeley, in Santa Fe and on a ranch in Northern New Mexico and is Executive Director of Freehold Taos, co-Founder of Provisional Art Spaces and Professor Emerita of Art History at Saint Mary’s College of California. Novakov is an art and technology correspondent for Art Press (Paris) and critical reviewer for The Magazine (Santa Fe).