Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator of contemporary art and public practice.
She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Esteban Muñoz, and is Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. At KU, she is co Primary Investigator on “Trans Studies at the Commons,” a multiyear $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for which she leads a national fellowship in oral history.
Jeanne is co-curator with Jennifer Doyle of the exhibition Scientia Sexualis, centering Black, feminist, decolonial, queer/trans, and crip interventions into the scientific apparatus of sex. Presented for the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for PST: Art and Science Collide led by the Getty, 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.
Jeanne held the inaugural position of scholar-curator at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. At ONE, where she organized curricular interventions and public programs, including a conversation with filmmakers Arthur Jafa and Tourmaline on the speculative aesthetics of Black archives. She organized Foucault on Acid, an exhibition of paintings by Grace Rosario that explored psychedelia, queer ecology, border wars, and the racial imaginary of the desert. She also curated a solo exhibition of Xandra Ibarra’s sculptures, which considered the interplay of race, disability, and consent in the archives of performance artists Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose.
Jeanne’s scholarly writing has been published in GLQ, Radical History Review, Trans Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Craft, and Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. With Joan Lubin, she co-edited a special issue of Social Text on the afterlives of American sexology. She has poetry chapbooks out with Belladonna and Eyelet Press. Jeanne served as the inaugural Arts & Culture Editor for Transgender Studies Quartlerly and is currently a General Editor.
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.