Lauren DeLand

Lauren DeLand is a scholar of contemporary and modern art whose work questions the primacy of vision and visibility and examines fragmented histories through queer and feminist theory. Through her teaching and scholarship she maps the points where art, activism, bodily autonomy, and alternatives to archival methodologies overlap. Her writing appears in the edited volumes October Files: Glenn Ligon (MIT Press, 2026) and Contemporary Transnational Feminist Visual Activism and Gender-Based Violence (Routledge, 2025), and in the journals Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and Criticism. As an art critic she has published extensively in Frieze, The Art Newspaper, and Art in America. Her curatorial work includes collaborations with venues in London, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Her belief that a humanities education grounded in the empowerment of the learner is a fundamental right is informed by over two decades of experience teaching art history and gender and sexuality studies to a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate students at colleges and universities across the U.S.