Ph.D., USC School of Cinematic Arts MFA, USC School of Cinematic Arts B.Arch, Rhode Island School of Design BFA, Rhode Island School of Design

Amy Murphy is currently an Associate Professor at USC’s School of Architecture. She has a Bachelor of Fine Art as well as a Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design, and a M.F.A. in Cinema Production and a Ph.D. in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Before joining the faculty at USC’s School of Architecture in 1990, Amy taught architecture at Iowa State University and the Boston Architectural Center. After working in Boston and LA at several larger offices, she started her own design practice, Amy Murphy Projects in 1996, completing numerous projects through the LA region (including the renovation of Rudolph Schinder’s Yates Studio in Silverlake). In the mid-1990s, Amy held the position of the Director of Filmforum, LA’s oldest non-profit dedicated to experimental media, and has completed several film and media works which have been accepted into national and regional film festivals. The majority of her written academic research focuses on the relationship between cinema and urban experience. In several of her more recent publications, such as “The Future Tradition of Nature” (2009) and “New Orleans, Nature and the Apocalyptic Trope” (2010) and “Nothing Like New: Our Post-Apocalyptic Imagination as Utopian Desire” (2013), she examines how our post-apocalyptic imagination works limit our culture’s capacity to change its attitude towards. Amy’s current work-in-progress (“Spatial Truths and Temporal Fictions: Cinematic Representations of the American City 1938-1978”) examines the emergence of hypersegregation in the postwar period, through the comparison of two seminal works of film, The City (1939) and Killer of Sheep (1977).