Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University and core faculty in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Her research spans feminist and queer theory, artistic labor, performance, craft histories, and visual culture of the nuclear age. She is the author of four books, including Art Workers (2009), Fray (2017), and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture (2023), and has edited or co-edited several journal issues and volumes.

She is Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), where she co-organized major exhibitions such as Women’s Histories and Queer Histories. Her curatorial work includes Louise Nevelson: Persistence at the 2022 Venice Biennale and Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which toured nationally. In 2024, she served as President of the International Jury at the 60th Venice Biennale.

A widely published critic, her writing has appeared in Artforum, October, Art Bulletin, The London Review of Books, and many others. She received the 2013 Art Journal Award and was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has been supported by major institutions including the Getty, the NEH, and the Terra Foundation. She has held visiting professorships at the Courtauld Institute, Williams College, and served as a 2023–24 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

In Paris, Bryan-Wilson will research her book AIDS is Contemporary, which argues that the 1980s AIDS crisis—not the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall—marks the true beginning of contemporary art by highlighting the urgency and inclusion of activist and non-traditional art forms like posters, zines, and performance. She will engage deeply with the archives and ideas from the recent Exposé-es exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and interview Paris-based activist Élisabeth Lebovici.