Zane is an older Ph.D. candidate, having earned both a B.A. in in Japanese language at Purdue University and then a B.F.A. in Sequential Art at Savannah College of Art and Design, thinking he was going to spend his career making art. But then after many years, he figured out that he likes the day-to- day practice and process of teaching about art way more than that of making art (he still likes making art! Just... once in a while, not every day.), so he decided to come back to graduate school to become a professor in art history and/or visual studies. Part of this decision also came about through some life-changing study-abroad experiences he got to have during his undergraduate degrees in which he not only got to encounter actual artworks and architecture instead of looking at pictures of them on slides, but got to experience professors who genuinely cared about facilitating cross-cultural encounters. He hopes that wherever he ends up in the future, he will be able to take students abroad and give them the kind of art, architecture, and culture encounters that made such a positive impact on him.

Zane received his master’s degree in Art History from the University of Oregon, where he wrote his thesis on the Japanese video game La Mulana, contemporary reception of ancient art forms, and an “adventurous” mystique persistent in pop cultural ideas of archaeology. He is now currently a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California Irvine, and has inverted his M.A. thesis approach: whereas previously he brought art historical methodologies to case studies of play media, he is now bringing play theory methodologies to art historical and visual culture case studies in his dissertation, Play by Play: Ludic Spaces, Interventions, and Media in 20th Century Japanese Visual Culture. His work as an intern at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in particular has led him to further research in especially Noguchi’s playground designs and play equipment sculptures. He has also done research on Meiji-era e-sugoroku (print board games) depicting aspects of Japan’s rapid modernization process; postwar avant-garde Japanese performance art groups; and the contemporary reception of what is visually recognized as traditional Japanese art forms/styles in relation to everything from tea ceremony to video games.

Zane looks for opportunities to teach wherever possible, and in addition to having taught as instructor-of-record for three classes at Irvine, he has had the privilege of teaching a graduate course on postwar Japanese art and architecture as a visiting lecturer at Kyūshū University. He has recently been contracted to design an upper-division art history course for online teaching, as well as explore the possibilities of creating database-driven teaching tools to aid teaching teams for high-enrollment survey lecture courses. Zane also has a persistent, unshakeable habit of sitting in on undergraduate courses whenever he has time, his own studies benefiting from the exposure to a variety of course content as well as his own pedagogical approach finding inspiration in seeing other pedagogical philosophies in action.

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