Kirsten Mairead Gill

Student Fellow

Kirsten Mairead Gill is a doctoral candidate in the art history department at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Primarily a scholar of moving image media, her dissertation traces a range of paradigmatic experiments in post-war cinema to argue that the sociality of moving image media was dramatically re-imagined in the light of Black liberation movements from the 1960s-1980s. She demonstrates how the problem of interracial relations was mediated cinematically, pushing toward the disorganization of the cinematic apparatus through methods including psychodrama, the hybridization of genre, media dispersal, and insurrection. The project asks what possibilities exist for solidarity, and for the re-making of social relations in, around, and by the cinema. Kirsten was Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Dia Art Foundation from 2019-2020 and has held positions at the ICA Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received a BA in art practice from Bates College and an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Participating Years

2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”