Emma C Roberts

Emma C. Roberts is a Ph.D. student in Film & Media Studies and the History of Art & Architecture. Her research examines how forms of group processing, rooted in psychotherapy and social psychology, have supplied artists with new forms and language for exploring the social, embodied, and temporal dimensions of experience since the late 1960s. Her dissertation treats "the therapeutic" as an ideology—sustaining discourses, aesthetics, and values that have conditioned artists to become authorities in group facilitation. This lens, she argues, is essential for understanding the evolving convergence between the disciplinary frames of art and psychotherapy. 

Her research interests include contemporary art, participatory practices, institutional critique, nontheatrical film, the sociology of art, and alternative pedagogies in art practice.

Selected Presentations

“Picturing Group Work: Psychoanalytic Authority in Who’s in Charge?” Presented at College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, February 2026.

“Who’s in Charge?: Group Work and Collaborative Cultural Practice.” Presented at London Study Day, Kings College London, May 2025.

“Smoothing Off the Rough Corners: In the Company of Men and the Interracial Encounter.” Presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, April 2025

“There-and-Then: Watching Leigh Ledare’s The Task.” Paper presented at Annual Critical Studies Symposium, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, June 2022.