Seminar Leaders

Core Seminar Leaders

Meleko Mokgosi (Director, Co-Founder of IATP) is an artist, associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Painting/Printmaking Department at the Yale School of Art. By working across history painting, cinematic tropes, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory, Mokgosi creates large-scale project-based installations that interrogate narrative tropes and the fundamental models for the inscription and transmission of history.

Miranda Samuels (Assistant Director of IATP) is an educator, researcher, and artist. As a Fulbright Scholar she attended the New School for Social Research, focusing on early modern political philosophy and aesthetics, and joined IATP as part of her Post Degree Academic Training. She has worked in public and community engagement for arts organizations including the Art Gallery of NSW, and UNSW Galleries, and developed research and education projects for Hermes Australia, Youth Off The Streets and the Countess Report, where she is co-editor. Her varied engagement with art, museums and education forms part of a larger inquiry into the role of aesthetics and artistic discourse in contemporary liberal democratic contexts, particularly settler-colonial contexts.

Kristen Hileman is a Baltimore-based independent curator and educator who spent nearly two decades working in museums, first as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and more recently as the Head of the Contemporary Department at The Baltimore Museum of Art. Her curatorial practice combines a strong interest in finding relevant platforms for celebrating under-recognized and regional artists, a desire to innovate within the museum and exhibition field, and unique expertise in commissioning site-responsive work from an international array of artists.

Jennifer Pranolo is an interdisciplinary media scholar based in New York. She received her PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College and a fellow in critical studies at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. Her work on film and digital aesthetics has appeared in Screen, Film Quarterly, the edited volume Screen Space Reconfigured, and elsewhere. Her current research explores the emergence of the figure of the user and the automation of labor and affect in contemporary art, cinema, and computational culture. She has taught at Pace University, the Yale School of Art, and Haverford College.

Amanda Parmer is a curator, writer, and PhD Candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University whose work considers how radical pedagogy shows up in institutions through aesthetic practices and communities. Previously she has served as the Director Programs for Independent Curators International and as the inaugural Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. As an educator and learner she has worked in museums and universities including the New Museum, Whitney Museum, Columbia University, New School, New York University, and Yale University. In 2014 she inaugurated parmer projects—a space for exhibitions, programming, and writing that focuses on queer, feminist strategies, and post-colonial analysis.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms Editions and the author of Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera, 2023)

Orlee Malka is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her conceptual and collaborative work considers the possibilities of art making within forms of collapse. In fieldwork to the unconsoled (2018) Malka examines issues of excavation practices and museum restitution. This ongoing project consists of objects, replicas, readings and experiments that are informed by practices of remembering and witnessing. Malka has presented her work at: Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ; The Clemente, New York; Protocinema, New York; ArteEast, New York; The Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability program at Columbia University; Artists House, Jerusalem; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; Mom’s Gallery, New York and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York among others. Malka received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018, and was among the inaugural fellows of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York. Malka is a faculty member in the MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

On Leave

Avi Alpert (Co-founder of IATP) is a scholar and writer who currently teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. His academic and creative work engages interdisciplinary research to challenge the conceptual frames through which we understand global culture. His first book, The Global Origins of the Modern Self, was published in 2019. His second book, A Partial Enlightenment, is forthcoming in April 2021.

Anthea Behm (Co-founder of IATP) is a visual artist who works across media, with a focus on concrete and digital photography, video and performance. Her current work deals with the politics of form, especially as it relates to feminist concerns about power and bodies. She has participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Anna Stothart is an independent curator and consultant based in New York. She was previously Curatorial Director of Lehmann Maupin in New York, Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Stothart’s curatorial and scholarly work has explored the ways artists perform and interrogate identity and gender as a way to disrupt and dislodge social and historical hierarchies and hegemonies.

Guest Seminar Leaders

(2022-2023)

Gordon R. Barnes Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Histories of Colonialism and Resistance in the Americas at the University of Washington, Tacoma. His research examines slavery, emancipation, and ideology in the 19th century British Empire.

William Powhida is both an artist and a fictional persona, POWHIDA, created by the artist to satirize notions of individual genius, the dependence on personal biography, and the art world’s extremely fucked up relation to wealth and class. He also wrote criticism for the Brooklyn Rail for a few years before focusing more on writing about issues affecting working artists and their communities. Currently he is co-host of Explain Me with Paddy Johnson, a podcast on the intersection of art, money, and politics. He is currently on faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Artist Advisor with Netvvrk, and a mentor with the International Lab for Artistic Practice (ILAP). He is also an active organizer with the artsunion.org

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York. His essays have appeared in periodicals including Artforum, Bookforum, 032C, and in several exhibition catalogs. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms Editions.

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue interested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, law and urban studies. She organizes workshops, produces publications, gatherings and exhibition work focused on using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Working with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, actors, physical therapists, athletes, teachers and students across different backgrounds the work gives rise to political articulations of collectivity.

Dana Kopel is a writer, editor, labor organizer, and communist. She is a current PhD candidate in History.

Oliver Herring is a visual artist known internationally for his use of experimental techniques as a means to better understand human nature, individual behavior, and interpersonal dynamics. Herring’s work is in the collections of many major institutions, and has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, NY; the Whitney Museum of Art, NY; Performa 09, NY; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Blanton Art Museum, Austin, TX; and the Denver Art Museum, CO.

(2021-2022)

Diana Al-Hadid is a Syrian-American artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Her sculptures take towers as their central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism. Al-Hadid constructs forms that are a baroque complex of architectural structures and figurative allusions which appear to be in a state between construction and deconstruction. She re-interprets a variety of common sculpture materials, such as cardboard, wood, plaster and metal to create sculptures that are simultaneously dense with material yet seemingly ethereal and gravity defying. Many of Al-Hadid’s newer pieces blur the boundary between sculpture and painting. Al-Hadid attended Kent State University where she received her BFA and later attended Virginia Commonwealth University where she received her MFA in sculpture. Notable solo Exhibitions include, Akron Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Nasher Sculpture Center. Al-Hadid has also shown in num erous Public Collections, which include, the Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Judith Rothschild Collection.

Cassandra Xin Guan is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University, where she recently received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media. She is also a faculty member at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her publications include “Critique of Flowers: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility” in October, a co-edited dossier on the theme of “Natural Aesthetics” in Screen, and a forthcoming book chapter on Ulrike Ottinger's ethnographic documentary China: The Arts, the Everyday. She is currently working on a book manuscript about plasticity and animation called “Maladaptive Media: ‘Life’ and Other Works of Animation.” Cassandra will begin a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology in Fall 2023.

Amanda Parmer is a doctoral student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University and an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2014 she inaugurated parmer — a space for exhibitions, programming and writing that focuses on queer, feminist strategies and post-colonial analysis. From 2018-2019 she worked as the Director of Programs at Independent Curators International and previously served as the inaugural Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She has presented exhibitions, programs, and events for e-flux; the New School; the New Museum; The New York Armory and Volta Shows; The Kitchen; as well as Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn and Berlin. She has held residencies with the Danish Arts Council International Research Programme in Copenhagen and Møn, the Abrons Art Center in New York as well as the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Høvikodden, Norway. She has contributed catalog essays for numerous organizations including CUE Art Foundation, Brandts Museum of Photographic Art, Fotografisk Center, and Buró-Buró and she is a contributing writer for Art in America, art&education, Artforum and BOMB. She has also taught at New York University, The New School and Rhode Island School of Design.

Paulina Pobocha is an Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she has worked since 2008. At MoMA she has organized The Long Run (co-organized with Cara Manes), 2017; Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy, 2016; Projects 103: Thea Djordjadze, 2016 (at MoMA PS1); Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, 2013 (co-organized with Ann Temkin); Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, 2013 (co-organized with Ann Temkin and MUMOK, Vienna). Additionally, she is actively engaged in museum acquisitions, collection displays, and the 2019 expansion project. Prior to joining the curatorial staff of The Museum of Modern Art, Pobocha was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York where she lectured on a broad range of subjects in contemporary and modern art. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications and exhibition catalogues. Pobocha received her B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and her M. Phil. in 2005 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Isabel Venero is a senior acquisitions editor at large for Rizzoli where she focuses on contemporary artists’ monographs and exhibition catalogues. She has published artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Kara Walker, Julie Mehretu, Robert Colescott, Kehinde Wiley, Eamon Ore-Giron, Liza Lou, David Driskell, Shirin Neshat, Takashi Murakami, Peter Doig, Ryan McGinley, Peter Saul, Laurie Anderson, and Yayoi Kusama, among others. In addition to her publishing work, she advises artists on various aspects of their practice, including gallery relations, exhibitions and publications. Before entering the publishing field, she was a curatorial assistant at the New Museum working closely with founding director Marcia Tucker. She completed her coursework for her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

(2019-2020)

Seminar year shortened due to pandemic.

Michael Kelly is a Professor of Philosophy specializing in aesthetics in combination with critical theory, political theory, and ethics. He is author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art (Columbia University Press, 2012; paperback 2017) and Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and he’s Editor-in Chief of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2014, 2nd edition). Kelly is also the Founder and President of the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation, which has organized nine Questioning Aesthetics Symposia in four countries over the last four years: https://transaestheticsfoundation.org/

Mary Kelly is Judge Widney Professor in the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. She is known for project-based work that addresses questions of sexuality, identity and memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. Exhibitions include retrospectives at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (2010) Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, (2011), and Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, (2008), as well as representation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and Documenta 12. Major publications include Post-Partum Document, (1983), Imaging Desire, (1996), Rereading Post-Partum Document (1999), and Dialogue, (2011). She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, (2015).

Yolanda Medina is Associate Professor of Teacher Education Yolanda (Jolie) Medina teaches Social Foundations of Education and Art Education courses and is Coordinator of the department’s Childhood and Bilingual Childhood Education Programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the author of Critical Aesthetic Pedagogy: Toward a Theory of Self and Social Empowerment (2012), and co-author of Latinos/as on the East Coast (2015), and Social Foundations: Critical Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Leading in the 21st Century (2015).

(2018-2019)

Kwami Coleman is a pianist, composer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research interests include experimental music history, jazz history, the history and music cultures of the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Kwami is currently working on a monograph of Miles Davis and the jazz avant-garde and articles on black musical avant-gardism and historiography, the pianist/composer Andrew Hill, and the authenticity wrought by locality in African American music culture of the last century.

Jeff Dolven is a Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (Chicago 2007), Senses of Style (Chicago 2017), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet 2017), as well as essays on a variety of subjects, including Renaissance metrics, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare’s reading, Fairfield Porter, and player pianos. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals in the US and the UK and are collected in a volume, Speculative Music (Sarabande 2013). He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet (link is external) magazine, and was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities .

Taraneh Fazeli is a visual arts curator and educator from New York. In her ongoing project “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying,” artists and community groups investigate how care for the body in states of debility and disability (and particularly its temporalities) can help us to re-imagine collectivity as existence under capitalism and interwoven forces of oppression becomes impossible. Those involved draw upon a draw upon a relational political model of disability that views dependency with others positively, using the arts space to imagine myriad radical possibilities for negotiating the problems of the bodymind.

Jeremy Matthew Glick is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama. He is currently working on long-form essays on Frantz Fanon, Sam Greenlee's Black Power Detective Fiction, and Century-Methodological Approaches to African American Literature. His second book project is entitled Coriolanus Against Liberalism/ Coriolanus & Pan-Africanist Loss.

Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate inXru-Rx-I trans/gender studies at Rutgers. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. Most recently, they received a Palestinian American Research Committee grant and are currently serving as a 2017-2018 Queer Arts Mentor. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign.

Shadi Harouni is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Studio Art at New York University. She holds an MFA in studio art from NYU and a BA in Fine Arts from University of Southern California. Harouni’s practice in visual arts ranges from site-specific interventions, video and sculpture, to photography, printmaking and publishing. Her research centers on marginalized and forgotten histories of dissent and resistance, chiefly in the Middle East. Her works follow the subtle and intricate ways in which power attempts to erase and abolish and the kinds of ingenuity and strategy individuals employ to resist erasure. Her recent projects have been exhibited internationally in public and private venues including The Queens Museum, NY, Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE, MUCA Roma, MX, Fondazione Ratti, IT, and featured in publications that include Art Forum, The Guardian and The New York Times.

Michelle Lee’s research and pedagogical interests include nineteenth-century French literature and culture, Orientalism, travel writing and photography. More specifically, her work examines the impact of Orientalism and imperial practices on the development of French prose, poetry and photography in the nineteenth century. Her current book manuscript, Imagination, Mimesis, and Style: Rethinking Nineteenth-Century French Realism, Travel Narratives, and Photography, studies the influence of travel writing in the early works of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Charles Baudelaire from the 1830s to 1860s. It argues that far from secondary to the development of nineteenth-century French literature and photography, romantic orientalist discourse and tropes have in fact shaped French artistic practices.

Mia Locks is an independent curator based in New York. She was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, with Christopher Y. Lew, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and previously held positions at MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Her other exhibitions include Greater New York (2015), co-organized with Douglas Crimp, Peter Eleey, and Thomas J. Lax; Math Bass: Off the Clock (2015); Im Heung-Soon: Reincarnation (2015); The Little Things Could Be Dearer (2014); and Samara Golden: The Flat Side of the Knife (2014). She also curated Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980 (2011), with David Frantz, as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. She is currently on the faculty of the Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Jennifer Ponce de León (formerly Jennifer Flores Sternad) received her PhD in American Studies from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, her M.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her A.B. in Literature from Harvard University. Her research is situated at the intersection of literary studies, studies of contemporary visual arts and aesthetics, and the study of social movements, bringing together contemporary U.S. Latino and Latin American cultural production within a hemispheric framework. Her areas of specialization also include Latino/a and Latin American cultural studies, Marxist cultural studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and critical development studies.

Sreshta Rit Premnath (born 1979, Bangalore, India) works across multiple media, investigating systems of representation and reflecting on the process by which images become icons and events become history. Premnath is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and has had solo exhibitions at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Kansas Gallery, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; and Art Statements, Art Basel. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong and Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai.

Gabriel Rockhill is a French-American philosopher, cultural critic and public intellectual. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique in Paris, and former Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie. His work spans the fields of history, aesthetics, technology and politics, and he is a regular contributor to public intellectual debate.

Adam Spanos studies the cultural traffic between the major imperial powers and the Arabophone polities of the Eastern Mediterranean. His work focuses on instances of borrowing, rejection, mutation and the unpredictable turn in the encounters touched off by colonialism and neocolonialism. He is particularly interested in the ways that Arabs have used Western literary forms to undo and recompose the presuppositions of Western aesthetics, politics, and anthropology. Spanos received his PhD in English at New York University with a focus on postcolonial studies. His doctoral research queried the proliferating figurations of time in twentieth-century Egyptian and Lebanese literature. The product of this investigation argues that Arab novelists, playwrights, and cultural critics sought to elaborate nonlinear models of time in order to make sense of the historical changes precipitated by imperialism and to discern paths to more just futures.

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