Knowledge area: Digital Heritage and Archiving; Media Arts Preservation; Storytelling Practices
Category: Lecturer professor
Research group: MIRMED-GIAC (URV, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology).
Department: History and Art History
Contact:
- Office: 4.15
- Email: vaninayael.hofman@urv.cat
- Tel: 977 55 85 74
Bio:
Vanina Hofman works in a hybrid space between research, teaching, and cultural production, understanding the latter as the space where the university builds bridges with its community. Her interests focus on the study of processes of remembering and forgetting in digital culture, the construction of unconventional art histories, the media archaeology, and digital materialities. Her approach is deeply rooted in empirical and situated methodologies.
Currently, she serves as a Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) through a competitive position. Since 2025, she has been the Head of the Art History and Archaeology Degree, and since 2023 she has coordinated the Aula de Cinema i Arts Audiovisuals, an interdisciplinary space dedicated to promoting, studying, and preserving audiovisual heritage, with particular emphasis on productions originating in the Camp de Tarragona and Terres de l'Ebre regions in Catalonia.
Vanina has been teaching and developing courses related to cultural heritage preservation and digital humanities, particularly within the bachelor's degree in art history and archaeology at URV, as well as in the Arts and Design degrees at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She has also contributed at the master's level, co-supervised a doctoral thesis, and guided over thirty undergraduate and master's theses. She currently represents the Department of History and Art History on the Faculty Research Commission. In the context of the URV, she is also co-founder an active member of the H-LAB (Digital Humanities Labo) team.
In 2006, she raised the cultural association Taxonomedia to study practices of preservation and archiving of electronic/digital art. She was awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3 - Universitat Oberta de Catalonia, Spain) in 2010 to deepen her research in this area. Her resulting dissertation, awarded cum laude, was later published as a book by Editorial Prometeo Libros (2019), supported by the Argentine Ministry of Culture under the title Divergent Practices of Media Arts Preservation. Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Culture.
She has presented her pre- and postdoctoral work in national and international academic and cultural forums, such as ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), Media Art Histories, and the conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST), among others. Likewise, she has published in journals including Artnodes, ICONO 14, Arte-Individuo-y-Sociedad, and Virtual Creativity. She has been invited to participate in various workshops and professional forums, such as drafting the second protocol for interdisciplinary research within the framework of the WIKR project supported by Education & Culture (EU), or the Arxius Oberts session of the Cultura Viva Node promoted by the Barcelona City Council.
The current research projects she is involved with are: safeARTECH - Safeguarding digital, experimental and technological art of the last decades in Spain: Perspectives, challenges and opportunities [2025-2028] funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness where she is part of the research team and co-responsible for the interviewing fieldwork tasks; BOGES ' Educational project on the practices and discourses of Francoist institutions in the pathologization of sexually or politically divergent women [2025] founded by the Memorial Democràtic, Generalitat de Catalunya, which co-directs with Jaume Camps; MESJENET [2022-2026] funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness where she leads the work package of memory and storytelling; and ELS BESSONS DIGITALS A L'AULA, a project for co-designing sustainable, transferable, and open strategies for preserving local cultural heritage [2024-2026], funded by the Teaching Innovation Grants Program of the Institute of Educational Sciences (URV), which she leads as Principal Investigator.
She serves as a reviewer for journals such as Leonardo, Artnodes, Digithum, and Intervención. Additionally, she was an artistic jury member for SIGGRAPH (2023 and 2024 editions) and for the Juan Downey International Media and Audiovisual Arts Contest (2024), among others.
Ten selected contributions related to cultural heritage and media arts preservation:
Hofman, Vanina: Your Hosting Service Has Been Deactivated: Persistence and Discontinuity in the Preservation of Latin American Media Arts. Presented at ISEA - 30th Internation Symposium on Electronic Art, Seoul (Korea), 25-26 May 2025.
Hofman, Vanina; Montero, Valentina (July 2024). Creative, Collective and Divergent Practices in the Virtualization of Cultural Heritage. Virtual Creativity, Volume 13, Issue Immersive Horizons: Blurring the Creative Frontiers Between Virtual and Material Worlds, p. 199 - 211.
https://doi.org/10.1386/vcr_00084_1
Hofman, Vanina; Fiz, Ignacio: Cultural Heritage Virtualization: A Collaborative Hands-on Approach for Training Students in Archaeological Preservation, presented at ISEA - 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Meanjin (Australia), 21-29 June 2024.
Hofman, Vanina; Montero, Valentina (2023) Poéticas anarchivísticas. Algoritmos que activan el patrimonio audiovisual. AISTHESIS, 74, 363-381.
https://revistaaisthesis.uc.cl/index.php/RAIT/article/view/50151
Hofman, Vanina; Montero, Valentina: Divergent, Collective and Creative Practices for Virtualization of Cultural Heritage, presented online at Media Art Histories: Re:source, Venezia (Italy), 13-16 September 2023.
Montero, Valentina; Hofman, Vanina. (2022) mundo[>·<]interior// backup! v.3.1 Un ejercicio de archivo performativo para el patrimonio artístico digital latinoamericano. H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte, 12, 163-178.
https://doi.org/10.25025/hart12.2022.08
San Cornelio Gemma; Hofman, Vanina; Ardèvol Elisenda; Sivera, Silvia. (2022) Creatividad y futuros en stop motion: aprendiendo a construir historias colaborativamente. Arte, individuo y sociedad, 34(1), 369-388.
https://doi.org/10.5209/aris.74339
Roig Telo, Antoni; Hofman, Vanina; Pires de Sa, Fernanda (2021). Cazadores de Historias: Un caso de implementación de storytelling en el aula como herramienta para incentivar la creatividad colectiva. ICONO 14. Revista Científica De Comunicación y Tecnologías Emergentes, 19(2), 235-260.
https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v19i2.1707
Hofman, Vanina; Montero, Valentina: Convergencies and divergencies between art and archive (PID_00284741), Documentation and preservation of contemporary art based on unstable media and materials (PID_00284744) and Performing the archive (PID_00284742). Online educational materials commissioned by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, September 2021.
Hofman, Vanina (2020). El storytelling cómo método para construir "otros posibles" en la historia del arte. In Gázquez-Linares, J, J, et al. (ed): Innovación Docente e Investigación en Arte y Humanidades. Avanzando en el proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje (pp. 1117 - 1127). Madrid: Editorial Dykinson.