Director Biographies
Barbara Clausen
Curatorial Research Director
Barbara Clausen (PhD, University of Vienna, Austria) is Associate Professor and the Vice Dean for Research and Creation at the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), Canada. Clausen has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices and the parallel discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive. Since 2000 she has curated numerous exhibitions and performance series in Europe, the United States, and Canada. She is the Curatorial Research Director of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, as well as the director of the FRQSC funded research project An Annotated Bibliography in Realtime: Performance Art in Quebec and Canada (2014–2020) and the SSHRC funded project Keeping it Live: on the intersection of performance, archives and exhibitions (2017–2022).
Deena Engel
Technology Research Director
Deena Engel teaches undergraduate computer science courses on web and database technologies, as well as courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the Digital Humanities and the Arts and she supervises undergraduate and graduate student research projects in the Digital Humanities and the Arts. Deena is the Co-Director along with Prof. Glenn Wharton of the Artist Archives Initiative and she also continues her research and collaboration with a number of museums on the conservation of Time-based Media and software-based art while pursuing a PhD at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
Glenn Wharton
Academic Research Director
Glenn Wharton is a Professor of Art History at UCLA and Chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials. Prior to this recent appointment, he was on faculty in the Museum Studies Program at New York University where he researched and taught about conserving new forms of contemporary art and social justice programming in museums. From 2007–2013 he served as Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to being a Co-Director of the Artist Archives Initiative, in 2006 he founded Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA), a non-profit organization focusing on the production, presentation, and preservation of contemporary art.
Team Biographies
Nesma Belkhodja
Nesma Belkhodja is a graduate of New York University’s class of 2019, with a degree in Computer Science and minor in Studio Art. Her interests include digital humanities, creative coding, and art conservation, preservation, and archiving. Nesma is currently working as a Software Developer at a media production company.
Jeanne Dreskin
Jeanne Dreskin is a writer, curator, and editor based in Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a Researcher at Berggruen Institute and a 2021 Writer in Residence for Monument Lab. She has previously held positions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and Dia Art Foundation. She has organized exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles and New York and her writing and curatorial work has been featured by publications including Artforum, Frieze, and Aperture.
Brandon Eng
Brandon Eng is a PhD candidate in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where his doctoral work examines the relationship between economic austerity and cultural production in the 1970s. He was a Research Associate for the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base from September 2017 to December 2018, and presented his preliminary research at the Artist Archives Initiative symposium in Spring 2018. Prior to his doctoral studies he received his BA with High Honors from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and worked for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.
Taylor Healy
Taylor Healy is a fourth-year conservation student specializing in time-based media at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. During the course of her studies, she has gained experience in objects conservation, textile conservation and time-based media conservation treatments. She has completed internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Scottish National Galleries, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. She received a BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 and maintains a studio practice working with materials such as metals, glass, textiles and plastics. She is endlessly fascinated by modern and contemporary materials.
Allison Kalb
Allison Kalb is an MA student in the Art History program at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Clausen, her Master’s thesis examines recent configurations of documentary practices in the form of multimedia installations in the works of Hito Steyerl, Angela Melitopoulos, and Joan Jonas. She is the artistic programming director for the 2021 edition of the Montréal/Tiohtià:ke-based performance art festival RIPA (rencontre interuniversitaire de performance actuelle), and co-coordinator of the UQAM art history graduate association.
Alhena Katsof
Alhena Katsof is a curator and writer whose exhibition-based projects include Towards the Unknown, a traveling show of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by the musician Yusef Lateef, which debuted at White Columns in New York. Katsof’s writing has appeared in publications including Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present (Dancing Foxes Press and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), The Artist As Curator: An Anthology (Mousse Publishing), and Solution 263: Double Agent, co-authored with Dana Yahalomi of Public Movement (Sternberg Press). Katsof is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at New York University.
JooHee Kim
JooHee Kim recently graduated from New York University (NYU), with a Master’s degree in the Museum Studies program. Before coming to NYU, she studied and graduated from a Master’s program in Humanities at the University of Chicago. Her primary field of interest is twentieth-century art, performance, technology, and documentation and to revisit the role of new media in expanding space in visual art.
Geneviève Marcil
Geneviève Marcil is assistant coordinator, exhibitions and communications at VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine in Montreal, as well as an independent scholar, curator, and author. Her interests reside in the study of material and conceptual considerations in artistic practices in relation with the socioeconomic context of the post-war period. She completed a master’s degree in art history at Université du Québec à Montréal (2018) and worked as a research assistant at Dia Art Foundation (2018–2019).
Kristin Poor
Kristin Poor (Assistant Director for Curatorial Research, Joan Jonas Knowledge Base) is an art historian and curator who has held curatorial positions at Dia Art Foundation and the Princeton University Art Museum. She is editor of Emily Roysdon, Uncounted: Call & Response (Revolver Press); and a coeditor of Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (MIT Press) and a forthcoming Joan Jonas monograph (Dia Art Foundation). Poor’s writing has appeared in Aperture, The Burlington, and Art Asia Pacific, and she has recently contributed essays to Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (MoMA) and Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present (Dancing Foxes Press and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art). She was a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Poor holds a BA in art history from Columbia University and an MA from Princeton University, where she is a PhD candidate.
Camille Richard
Camille Richard is a researcher who lives and works in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. As an MA student in art history at Université du Québec à Montréal, her research focuses on curatorial studies and conceptual/contextual artistic practices that redefine the exhibition space and the production of knowledge. Her more recent curatorial projects include : Refus contraire (Galerie de l’UQAM, 2018) and Liminal Field (Espace Parenthèses, Manif d’art 10, 2022). She also participated in research residencies at Est-Nord-Est (Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, 2020) and at La Chambre Blanche (Québec, 2021).
Tracy Robinson
Tracy Robinson is an art historian, archivist, and educator based in New York. She graduated from New York University with a Master’s degree in Museum Studies in 2020 and has completed esteemed internships with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Her research focuses on the crossroads of accessibility, archiving, and art education.
Lozana Rossenova
Lozana Rossenova (PhD, London South Bank University, UK) is a digital designer and researcher based in Berlin. She completed a PhD degree at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organization. Her research focuses on questions related to data presentation and performativity in Linked Open Data environments. Lozana is particularly interested in open source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructure. Besides her academic work, Lozana works with art and/or technology organizations in helping them plan and implement digital archive solutions, or develop new pathways of interaction for challenging user workflows.
Melissa Tincopa
Melissa Tincopa is a historian at heart. She has assisted with numerous archival and curatorial projects at institutions including, The Museum of Tolerance, The Jewish Museum, The GRAMMY Museum, and the Petersen Automotive Museum. At the moment, Melissa is researching, writing, and producing short video segments about unique and often unheard parts of history.
Jason Varone
Jason Varone is an artist and designer based in both the Berkshires and New York City. He is also the Web & Electronic Media Manager at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.