This volume offers transdisciplinary perspectives on the study of acting and performance in moving image forms. It assembles 26 international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art history and philosophy to investigate the art of acting and the presence of the human body in analog and digital film, animation and video art. The volume includes classical case studies and essays devoted to acting history and acting and genres, but its particular emphasis is on introducing a wide range of groundbreaking theoretical approaches - from continental and analytic philosophy to new media theory and cognitivist research - all of which interrogate the fundamental conceptions of »act« and »actor« that underwrite both popular and academic notions of performance in moving image culture.

Jörg Sternagel (PhD) teaches Media Studies at the University of Potsdam. His research focus is media and phenomenology.
Deborah Levitt is Assistant Professor in Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York City. She is a media historian and theorist. Her research focuses on media, biopolitics, and rhetorics of life.
Dieter Mersch (Prof. Dr. emerit.) was professor for media theory and media studies at Universität Potsdam, director of the Institute of Theory at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, and from 2018 to 2021 he was the president of the German Society for Aesthetics. His main fields of expertise are contemporary continental philosophy, media philosophy, aesthetics and art theory, semiotics, hermeneutics, poststructuralism and philosophy of the image, music and language.