I am a writer, art historian, and educator specializing in modern and contemporary art, and the role of art in contexts of land-based resistance.

My recent research examines the development of experimental practices and alternative arts institutions in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and considers how artists have contributed to movements for Indigenous self-determination. Home Rule Contemporary, my book in progress, focuses on the work of Kalaallit Inuit, Iivit, and Inughuit artists whose practices developed between the 1970s and 1990s, a period of heightened anticolonial activity in their homeland. I am interested in how these artists—who were the first in their communities to explore media like installation, body art, and video—challenged forms of colonial representation through conceptual and formal methods that echoed activists’ efforts to disrupt established patterns of political representation.

On a broader level, I am interested in thinking about how art has actively advanced political struggles, particularly Indigenous communities’ efforts to reaffirm their cultural, visual, and political sovereignty—a concern that is also central to my teaching, and which I hope to impart to students. In-progress projects span the topics of monochrome painting and Fourth World activism, earthworks and settler colonialism, land-based political collectives, and the reception of Indigenous art among the historic and postwar avant-garde.

My writing has appeared in journals such as October, Peripeti, Kunst og Kultur, Kritik, and Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; in exhibition catalogues for the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and Nuummi Eqqumiitsulianik Saqqummersitsivik / Nuuk Art Museum; and in periodicals including First American Art Magazine, Neriusaaq, and Kunst.gl. In 2017, at the invitation of Nuuk Art Museum, I curated Akorngusersuineq - Interruption, an intervention at Greenland’s National Museum focused on the art and legacy of Pia Arke.

I received my PhD from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), my MA from the University of British Columbia (Canada), and my BA from the University of Oslo (Norway), all in art history. I have previously taught at the Art History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan’s History of Art Department, and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Chicago is home.