Greg Langner is a tenured Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Antelope Valley College, in the far-north rural region of Los Angeles County. Building on backgrounds in community organizing, arts management, campaign politics, and public performance, Greg's Ph.D. in Communication and Performance Studies — earned with a graduate minor in Film and Media Arts — focused on developing critical, creative, and ethnographic research methods. Interrogating plainly uneven worldviews and the destructive behaviors always following them, Greg's practice-based research centers embodied knowledge, individual intuition, scientific inquiry, and collaborative experience, with sharp interest in the potential of creative and digital media to influence individual and social change. (TLDR: Geeky professor teaching and researching the persuasive potential of public performance.)

“I've also got a real particular kick, if you happen to notice, for cartoons and their expressive value in contemporary culture, majorly motivated by life as a vibrantly atypical learner.”

~ Greg

“This work identifies across the human experience the increasingly relevant trend of animated cartoons ‘escaping’ the technologically two-dimensional film, television, and tablet screens which have prominently defined the medium for generations, appearing beyond — in corporeal form — to occupy and share our same physical space in materially impactful ways, which are impossible to ignore . . .

. . . with each weekday watching I found in just 30 minutes allowed a vibrant, and visceral, and unsubdued sense of self clinging playfully but desperately to the endless expressivity of each cartoon’s perfect plasticities and possibilities; their unique and fantastical capacities to capture, create, and satiate the basic human freedoms of thought and expression.”

@ Society for Animation Studies 2023 | Rowan University