Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris III, he obtained a PhD. at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King's College, University of London, where he founded the Department of Film Studies and the Film Study Centre. Before coming to the University of Chicago, he was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, where he also helped create a new PhD. program in Film and Visual Studies. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Among other honors, he has been a Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Free University of Berlin. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rodowick is also a curator and an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. With Victor Burgin, he was awarded in 2016 a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago, to produce new video work. He is also a member of the International Association of Art Critics and the Arts Club of Chicago.
Rodowick’s artwork is represented by the gallery Campagne Première Berlin. His digital moving image works were recently selected for conservation and distribution by the Light Cone collection in Paris. For more information, visit www.bauleute.org.