Gillian Sneed
Pronouns: she/ella/ela
Assistant Professor
Art History
Art History and Foundations Coordinator
SDSU
Bio
Gillian Sneed (she/ella/ela) is Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Art History in SDSU’s School of Art + Design. She received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research broadly examines 20th- and 21st-century feminist art histories of the Americas, with a focus on Brazilian modern and contemporary art and transnational artistic exchanges between Latin America and the U.S. Her scholarship has addressed the intersecting genres of film, video, performance, conceptual and socially engaged art, and the gendered, sexual, and racial politics at play in these practices. At SDSU, she teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate global art history and visual culture courses, including courses on modern and contemporary art of the Americas.
Sneed has published articles and reviews in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art International, and Texte zur Kunst, and she has published academic articles in the peer-reviewed journals Brésil(s), Diacrítica, and Women’s Art Journal. Her most recent publications include The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, 1976-1980 (Lenbachhaus/Ludwig Forum/Spike Island/Swiss Institute, 2022), co-edited with Marie Warsh, and an article on Brazilian artist Lygia Pape in the peer-reviewed journal Revista de História da Arte (2021). She is also currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation about gender and identity in Brazilian performance-for-camera since the 1970s, and on a chapter about Brazilian women’s video art of the 1970s for the volume Pop Cinema, edited by Glyn Davis and Tom Day (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
Most recently, Sneed has been invited as a guest speaker at La Jolla Playhouse (San Diego, 2022), Americas Society (New York, 2022), and at the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute The Making of Modern Brazil (SDSU, 2022). She has curated exhibitions of contemporary art at various venues and is currently preparing an exhibition to be held in SDSU’s University Art Gallery of art that reflects on the Amazon rainforest that will coincide with the next Brazilian Studies Association Congress hosted by SDSU in 2024. Sneed has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association of Latin American Art, the Getty Foundation, and the Terra Foundation. She is a member of the Association of Latin American Art, the Latin American Studies Association, the US Latinx Art Forum, the Academic Museums and Galleries Association, and the College Art Association, where she is also on the Committee on Diversity Practices.