Julia Sonnevend is a Ph.D. student in Communications at Columbia University, a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, the Center on Organizational Innovation, Columbia University and the Center for Media and Communication Studies, Central European University.

She received her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, her Juris Doctorate and her Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

Sonnevend studies the intersections between communications, art history, visual sociology and legal theory. Her research areas include icons and society, globalization theories, visual culture theories, cultural trauma, the history of photography with a special focus on digital photography,  critical communications studies, visual representations of justice, law and performance, art and activism, access to knowledge, and post-communist identities.

She enjoys life in New York and spends considerable amount of time in the  Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Opera. Somehow, she gets the best ideas for papers when walking around in art museums because the visual representations from various centuries speak to her.