Hemispheric Institute Fellows

Lissette Olivares

Lissette Olivares, an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, pursues interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production. As an artist, activist, theorist, curator, and storyteller, her work emphasizes feminist epistemologies and draws from a diverse range of methodological approaches in critical theory, performance theory, cultural studies, visual studies, postcolonial studies and posthumanities.  She is especially interested in the interrelationship between aesthetics and politics and in analyzing the role of cultural resistance under periods of political repression. A doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is finishing her dissertation, Repertoires of Literary Resistance, which explores how literary performances during the 80s decade in Chile provided a symbolic space for the articulation of diverse democratic imaginaries. Her educational trajectory has taken her from the Americas to Asia, where she was granted a scholarship from the Chinese government to pursue studies in Mandarin at Beijing University. Lissette is also an alumna of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and an independent curator and critic specializing in contemporary art with an emphasis in performance and transmedia. She has curated numerous individual and collective exhibitions, including Chile’s first Performance Biennial in 2006, Grotesques at Toronto’s A Space Gallery in 2008, Disenchantment in the So Called First World at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin and most recently Writing Resistance in Crisis and Collaboration at the UCSC Library. In 2009 she co-founded the Museum and Curatorial Studies faculty research group, which is dedicated to exploring exhibitionary poetics and politics.  She is currently seeking non-profit status for The Skin Laboratory, an experimental space dedicated to exploring the dermis as canvas and trope. Her own artistic production has been featured in museums and performance venues around the world, including Christie’s Auction House, the Western Front Society, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile, and most recently at Kara Walker’s 6-8 Months Project Space. Lissette has been awarded numerous fellowships including, the Jane Dealy Wirsig Prize in Journalism, the McGuire Fellowship from Vassar College, the Curatorial Fellowship at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry -Berlin, and has been granted the Fulbright, Andrew Mellon, Jacob K. Javits, and NYU Transition and Postdoctoral Academic Diversity Fellowships for her interdisciplinary work.  She is currently developing an editorial project about the queer performance collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis and an edited volume on curatorial praxis with Lucian Gomoll.

As a 2010/2011 fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Lissette will be curating a multimedia project for e-misférica’s issue, “After Truth:  Justice, Memory and Related Aftermaths” which will focus on Alfredo Jaar’s recent memorial in Chile, La Geometriá de la Conciencia, (The Geometry of Consciousness). While in residence Lissette will also begin work on a web-cuaderno featuring Pia Barros and the Feminist Ergo Sum Publishing Collective, which will be accompanied by a curatorial event at Fales Library in early February. She also hopes to curate a performance series featuring contemporary performance practitioners in the Spring of 2011.