In 2003, she joined the USC faculty, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate and the Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. program.
Friedberg lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere, including invited talks in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna, Tokyo, Montreal, Bern, Lausanne, Stockholm, Prague, and at the Guggenheim Museum/NY, Art Institute/Chicago, and Getty Museum/LA.
Drawing on philosophical and theoretical texts ranging from the art historian Erwin Panofsky to poststructuralists like Derrida, Friedberg proposed that forms of static-image, moving-image, and computer-modeled representation represented significantly different systems susceptible to rigorous analysis.
Several of Friedberg's proposals lay at the center of a larger movement to more precisely and sustainedly interrogate and integrate philosophical, "theoretical" (notably post-structural and French), and art-historical investigations of the nature of human representations and their roots in historical and cultural contexts.
Among the most notable of these were distinctions between human sight and photographic representation, proposals on the nature of Durer's "veil," and an argument that Alberti's treatise was misinterpreted due to a failure to read the original Latin.