Rate My Professor Amanda Parmer

Amanda B. Parmer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School. Her research focuses on the ways radical pedagogy manifests in institutions through aesthetic practices and communities. In 2014, she founded parmer projects, a platform for exhibitions, programming, and writing centered on queer and feminist strategies alongside post-colonial analysis.

Parmer has extensive curatorial experience, serving as Director of Programs at Independent Curators International from 2018 to 2019 and as inaugural Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. She has presented exhibitions, programs, and events for The Kitchen, e-flux, The New School, The New York Armory, and Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn and Berlin, and organized the New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collection of Ideas. In teaching, she is the lead professor for “The Culture Industries” and “Cultural Capital: Media & Arts NYC” at NYU. She teaches an introductory theory seminar and advises students as a Visiting Critic in the Painting and Printmaking MFA at Yale. During 2023-24, she held the McKnight Fellowship as Visiting Critic and Core Faculty for the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. She has lectured at The New School and Rhode Island School of Design.

Among her honors are the Whitney Museum of American Art Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellowship, Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab Fellowship, Danish Arts Council International Research Programme Fellowship, and Leboff Fellowship. She has completed residencies at Abrons Art Center in New York, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway, and the Summer Institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University.

Parmer contributes as a writer to Art in America, art&education, Artforum, and BOMB Magazine, and has authored catalog essays for CUE Art Foundation, Brandts Museum of Photographic Art, Fotografisk Center, Independent Curators International, and the Whitney Museum of Art. Key publications include essays such as “Response-abilities of Vision” in Echoes of a Place (Buró—Buró, 2021), “Shaking the Sign” in It Must Out—Making Exhibitions Since 1968 (Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 2020), “Playing Institutions” in As Radical, as Mother, as Salad, as Shelter (Paper Monument, 2018), “Striking Nerves” in Art in America (2017), “Tunisian-Lampedusian Migrants and Commodities” in The Ocean After Nature (ICI, 2016), and “Our Human Entanglements with Corporeal and Terrestrial Grounds” in If Earth Were a Body, Borders Would be Wounds (Officen, 2016). She co-edited Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art (Yale University Press, 2011), Art, an Index to (see also Politics): 25 Years of Vera List Center Fellowships (2018), and Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe (Independent Curators International, 2019).