Lauren DiGiulio is an art historian, curator, and educator. Her research focuses on contemporary visual art and performance, with a particular emphasis on the way these fields intersect with feminist and queer theory, genre, and critical race theory. She writes about linguistic embodiment, ekphrasis, dramaturgical methods, and the history of critical theory, with a methodology rooted in the embodied practices of artistic production, primary document research, and radical care-based relational networking.
Her writing has been published in Feminist Modernist Studies, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Momus, Lateral Addition, In/Visible Culture, The Huffington Post, and Idiom Magazine. She has written commissioned texts for the Institute for Contemporary Art at UPENN, Sargeant’s Daughters, Williams College ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, the Barbican Centre, and the Kunstverein Langenhagen. Her chapter in an edited book volume, The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology, was published by Bloomsbury Academic. She publishes short form writing on her Substack, minor archives.
As an arts producer, she specializes in developing and implementing strategic initiatives for institutions, foundations, and private cultural enterprises. She has participated in strategic planning related to development, artistic programming, and equity initiatives at Dartmouth College, Sweat Variant, Ltd., the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, Carolina Performing Arts, and Ensemble Signal.
As a producer, she has worked with the New Island Festival on Governor’s Island, the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, and the Willem de Kooning Foundation. In her capacity as Director of Strategic Initiatives for Sweat Variant, Ltd., led by artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, she produced adaku part 1: the road opens, a co-commission by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has led major grant initiatives at Samita Sinha’s Anchor Space, Sweat Variant, Ltd., and Carolina Performing Arts.
In addition to organizing artist residency activities at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Rochester, she has curated events and exhibitions at the Watermill Center, the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. She was the dramaturg and artistic producer for The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles, a solo performance that was presented at multiple arts venues, including The Louvre, Performa 13, and the Institute for Contemporary Arts at UPENN.
From 2020-2021, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she directed the Mellon Foundation Discovery Through Iterative Learning (DisTIL) grant. She received her PhD from the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, her MA with Distinction from the Department of French at King’s College London, and her BA in Art History and French from Vassar College.
Selected Publications
Grid variations: Lucinda Childs Dance Company on Robert Moses Plaza
Feminist Modernist Studies
Between the Body and Language: Narratives of the Moving Subject in Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic
The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology
See You on the Other Side: Matthew Wong’s Vistas of the Mind
Momus
Disrupting the Grid: Lucinda Childs’s Scores for Silent Dances
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
Christopher Knowles: On Time
KVL Bulletin No. 11
Choreographing the Network: Christopher Knowles and the Social Practice of Stuttering
Christopher Knowles: In a Word
Gregory Miller & Co.
Couturier Lafargue’s Earthworks: Asbestos and Copper
InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture
Christopher Knowles and the Structured Logic of Play
Einstein on the Beach program book, The Barbican, London