Rodowick completed his Ph.D. in cinema and critical theory at the University of Iowa in 1983 under the supervision of Dudley Andrew, while studying experimental film and video making with Franklin Miller.
[5] He has also held fellowships at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität, Germany.
Rodowick was among the first scholars to write critical accounts in English of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, especially in the context of international film theory and philosophies of the image.
Expanding on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figural as an aesthetic order where the ontological distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down, he has written extensively on contemporary art and the new electronic, televisual, and digital media.
Since 2014, in several books Rodowick has been developing a philosophy of the humanities inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Georg Henrik von Wright, Charles Taylor, and Hannah Arendt.