Ioana Atanassova

I have been teaching Art History since 2014, with my specialty being Asian Art and Culture. I have taught courses on Manga and Anime, Japanese Video Game Design, Western Comics, Virtual Reality and Western Video Game Design, Culture in Modern South Asia, Asian Art History, South Korean Film, Manhua, Chinese Animation, The Sanskrit Epics, Turkish Cinema, and Chinese Martial Arts Literature (Wuxia). 

Furthermore, I am a practicing artist and writer. I have exhibited work in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Bulgaria, and Russia and am currently working towards my first exhibition in the United States. I have published academic essays in journals and am currently writing my first fiction novel.  

I have had a long career of working as an independent artist, curator and, in more recent times Professor of Art History and Culture. 

I have been working as an artist since I was 16 years old, while living in South Africa and later Botswana. I have worked for the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg as a curatorial assistant, where I assisted the curators of the Temporary Exhibitions in networking and research of new talent and artistic works in local areas. I also photographed and catalogued art works to prepare for upcoming exhibitions and established and maintained correspondence between young upcoming artists and the museum, prepared acquisition proposals and authenticated provenance of museum acquisitions. Furthermore, I planned education programs and managed book publications for orphanages funded by the museum. 

While living in Gaborone, Botswana I held a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings and acted as the curator for the exhibit. 

When I moved to the United States, I worked as both an artist and professor. Notably, I proposed all the classes I currently teach for Pace University: ART220 Aspects of Asian Art, ART227 Art of the Middle East, GLA214 Manga and Anime, GLA215 The Sanskrit Epics, GLA218 Art and Culture in Modern South Asia, GLA220 Japanese Video Game Design, GLA222 Chinese and Korean Animation, HIS297P Historicizing Western Comics, HIS299 History of Western Video Game and Virtual Reality. I also managed, along with the Director of Pace’s Global Asia Institute, student exchange programs and travel courses with Turkey, Egypt, UAE, China, Korea, and Japan. 

Currently, I am also the Editor in Chief of Pace academic Journal of Comics and Culture, where my job entails editing the layout and content of the academic Journal of Comics and Culture, Interviewing authors and comics artists for the publication, seeking out and selecting appropriate contributors and manuscripts, and researching, writing, and publishing academic essays. My work has brought me into contact with fames authors and comics artists, among which are Yoshitaka Amano, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Takeshi Obata, Abhishek Singh, Takashi Murakami, Lee Marrs, Neil Gaiman, Paul Levitz, Colleen Doran, Marc Silvestri, and Alan Moore. 

Having published several academic works, I am currently venturing into fiction writing. 

Ph.D. in Art Marketing, 2024

M.A. Art History and Visual Culture, 2013

B.A. History of Art