Undergraduate Institution Arizona State University
Undergraduate Degree BA in Art History, Minor in English
Masters Institution University of Georgia
Masters Degree MA in Art History
Hometown Bradenton, Florida
Degree Seeking PhD
Tara Kraft-Ainsworth is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Georgia.Her dissertation maps the correspondences between the verbal frameworks of attention in the detective novel, the visual syntax of Surrealist automatic paintings, and the ever-evolving perceptual taxes of modernity during the 1920s and 30s. Tracing forms of focus through natural language processing, computer vision algorithms, and close looking, she recreates a global and local architecture of attention that visualizes the tensions between cognition and culture. Her article, “Detecting Attention: Fictions of Perception in Paintings of Fantômas” appeared in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, 20 (2024). And, in September 2025, she was awarded the Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize.
