The interview is currently unavailable. Below is a detailed biography of the artist. Stay tuned to FigureGround.org — we’ll let you know if the original interview becomes available.
There’s something about how Mara Mills listens that feels… not disruptive, exactly. Just precise in a way that makes everything else feel fuzzy by comparison.
Her career path resists linear telling — not because it’s fragmented, but because it redefines what counts as signal in the first place.
Born in 1976, Mills earned degrees from Harvard and Stanford before moving into doctoral work at UC Santa Barbara. Early on, her writing drew attention — not loud declarations, but tightly focused studies on how technologies “hear,” mishear, or ignore altogether.
One of her first essays mapped the genealogy of the telephone as a tool of both access and exclusion — especially for deaf users. It wasn’t framed as critique or praise. Just evidence.
“Media are not neutral extensions,” she once wrote. “They’re conditioned by assumptions — and conditioning us right back.”
Accessibility as Infrastructure, Not Exception
By the mid-2010s, Mara Mills had joined the faculty at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, where she became a central voice in disability studies, media archaeology, and the politics of accessibility.
But that label — “disability scholar” — always felt both too narrow and too flat.
In her classroom, terms like “impairment” or “prosthesis” were treated less as categories than as histories with material consequences.
In 2015, during a lecture on time-stretched audio, she noted: “Slowness isn’t always impairment. Sometimes it’s calibration.”
At a glance — it sounded abstract. But then it didn’t.
Her work on sound technology — including hearing aids, phonographs, and closed captioning systems — wasn’t archival nostalgia. It showed how mechanical failures and commercial innovations shaped modern understandings of ability itself.
The captioning systems that fail to catch sarcasm? The software that assumes perfect hearing? Those are design decisions. And design is never neutral.
The Audiopolitical and the Material
With co-author Jonathan Sterne, Mills helped define the concept of the “audiopolitical”: the way power gets routed through noise, silence, fidelity, and distortion.
In 2017, she co-founded the NYU Center for Disability Studies — not as a service office, but as a site of intellectual production.
By Friday afternoons, students recalled, she often left notes projected onscreen instead of closing slides. Not bullet points — fragments. One read simply: “What’s not heard — and why?”
In interviews and essays, Mills resists the heroic narrative. She doesn’t frame access as a gift or disability as a deficit. Her approach is infrastructural — a study of conditions, not exceptions.
A student once described her seminars as “like tuning a radio where every static hum might mean something.”
That metaphor stuck — and maybe that’s fitting.
The Loop Isn’t Broken — It’s Rerouted
Mara Mills biography doesn’t unfold in rising arcs or dramatic shifts. It loops. It overlays.
She’s currently working on a book about the history of optical sound, and another on voice synthesis and perception — projects that weave engineering history with social analysis.
She doesn’t appear often in the kind of media coverage that celebrates “trailblazers.” But the field she’s helped shape — disability media studies — continues to grow, and grow in her direction.
Or maybe that’s the wrong frame entirely.
Maybe the work she does just reveals a field that was already there, faint but audible — like hearing bass through a neighbor’s wall.
Mara Mills doesn’t make noise. She tunes the circuit.
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