Dr. julia elizabeth neal

Board Member / Education and Programming Strategist

Intention Statement: My primary focus is to aid BWVA and its educational outreach through programs, and to expand the opportunities for access and learning through grants, fellowships, and community. 

Website:

https://www.nealje.com/about

julia elizabeth neal is a scholar of modern and contemporary US and African American Art. In 2023, she joined the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor and is currently on leave as a postdoctoral fellow for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. Prior to Michigan, neal lectured at Spelman College and Georgia State University. Her research considers the relationship between emergent politics of identity and transnationalism to visual, conceptual, and sonic, experimentation. She is presently working on her first book project, which explores the conceptual aesthetic and pedagogical praxis of Ben Patterson, a Pittsburgh-born multidisciplinary artist of international renown by his association with Fluxus.

Her publications record features articles on abstraction, performance, interdisciplinarity, and critical historiography. This spring, neal will give her first lecture-performance, “Groundings,” at Northwestern University as part of an ongoing criticality towards interdisciplinary methods. Her research has been generously supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the German-American Fulbright Commission.