About Rossen Ventzislavov

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Woodbury University. My primary research is in aesthetics, but I am also an avid reader of continental philosophy, critical theory, history, literature, and art criticism. I have presented and published original research on architecture, curating, psychoanalysis, popular music, literature and ethics. For more on my current philosophical preoccupations, teaching, and research plans see Philosophy.

I was born in Bulgaria and have been living in the United States of America for almost two decades. I have lived and grown in places as polluted as Pernik, as bucolic as Blagoevgrad, as paradoxical as Sofia, as berserk as New York, and as surreal as my current home, Los Angeles. I have traveled globally but find it difficult to imagine that any destination will ever enrapture me as intensely as Namibia did.

I am a student and occasional practitioner of the arts, forever indebted to them for the bearability of existence. I am a member of a performance art collective that engages in the practice of “Encounter”— a series of non-scripted gatherings, at which artists explore the limits of their responsiveness to a shared environment. I am a musician who plays the guitar not very well, sings not very well and tinkers with music-making software with variable success. I am a photographer who has an eye for much more than my photographs capture. I am a natural born critic, eager to dissect my aesthetic experiences in conversation and in writing.

I am a former mathematics prodigy-wannabe. The highest point in my mathematical career was reached at the age of ten when at an International Mathematics Olympiad in Varna I was the only person, in and out of competition, who solved the soap problem.