Rate My Professor Elise Archias

Elise Archias is Associate Professor of Art Since 1945 and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, part of the Arts and Culture faculty. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her appointment at UIC in 2012, she served as Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. Archias has been recognized with several fellowships, including a scholar-in-residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in 2011, a fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in spring 2016, and a Faculty Fellowship at UIC’s Institute for the Humanities for the 2023-2024 academic year to support her ongoing book project, Facing the Death of the Subject: Joan Mitchell and Melvin Edwards.

Her research centers on art since 1945, particularly performance art and dance, exploring the relationships between abstract ideals, physical materials, embodiment, and human needs in 20th- and 21st-century aesthetics and life. She advises PhD dissertations on contemporary art in the context of global capitalism and MA theses on modern and contemporary performance, sculpture, performance art, and public art. Archias authored the book The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci (Yale University Press, 2016), which received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 2018 and the Miess/Mellon Author’s Book Award in 2015. She curated the exhibition Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer at UIC’s Gallery 400 in winter 2017 and co-edited a special double issue of nonsite titled “Contemporary Art and the PMC” in 2021 and 2022. Her publications include “In Defense of Interiority: Melvin Edwards’ Early Work” in Arts (2023), “Volume Judgement: On the Art of Joan Mitchell” in Artforum, and “The Labor of Teaching and Administrative Hysteria” in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2023, with Blake Stimson). Archias has presented her work at the Getty Research Institute, Henry Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Archives of American Art, and Slought Foundation.