Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator of contemporary art and the history of sexuality. She is Lead Historian at the American LGBTQ+ Museum and Assistant Professor of Trans Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Esteban Muñoz.
With Jennifer Doyle she curated Scientia Sexualis, an ambitious group survey centering Black feminist, decolonial, queer/trans, and crip interventions into the scientific apparatus of sex. Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for the Getty-led PST: Art and Science Collide, Scientia Sexualis was named one of 2024’s “top ten best shows” by Frieze.
Jeanne’s book in process, Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is also the recipient of the American Historical Association’s Alan Bérubé prize for outstanding LGBT public history.
She is a General Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press. Scholarly publications include GLQ, Radical History Review, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Transgender Studies Reader 2. With Joan Lubin, she co-edited a special issue of Social Text on the afterlives of American sexology.
Jeanne’s scholarly and curatorial practice trace the idiosyncracies of the archive to activate visual histories and coalitions. She was a research fellow at the ONE Archives and Kinsey Institute and is on the Advisory Board of the NYC LGBT Center Archive. With AJ Lewis, Jeanne co-founded the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive organized in partnership with the New York Public Library. At University of Kansas she organizes “Listening for Liberation,” a trans oral history fellowship supported by a multiyear $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.
As an independent curator, Jeanne has organized exhibitions including carerotics: on giving and taking with Panteha Abaresh, Foucault on Acid with Grace Rosario Perkins, and Nothing Lower Than I with Xandra Ibarra. She also organized a multiyear public art presentation for the City of West Hollywood with artists Eve Fowler, Danielle Dean, and Jacolby Satterwhite.