Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator of contemporary art and public practice. Her writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasy of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. 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 received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University under the mentorship of José Esteban Muñoz. She is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas, and affiliate faculty at the Gunn Center for the Study of Speculative Fiction. At KU, she is a Primary Investigator on a multi-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation; the project will fund a national fellowship for scholar-activists in Transgender Studies.
Jeanne is the recipient of a Getty Foundation Pacific Standard Time grant to co-curate an exhibition with Jennifer Doyle for the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Scientia Sexualis is a survey of contemporary artists whose work confronts, dissolves, and reimagines sex and gender within the scientific apparatus. She curated Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics for the Cooper Union, in addition to the exhibitions Reading Room: the feminist art of self-help and Curriculum: spaces of learning and unlearning.
Most recently, Jeanne held the inaugural position of scholar-curator at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. At ONE, she organized curricular interventions and public programs, including a conversation with filmmakers Arthur Jafa and Tourmaline on the speculative aesthetics of Black archives. She curated 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.
Independently, Jeanne has organized performances, commissions, symposia, and public programs with artists including Julie Tolentino, Brontez Purnell, Paul Preciado, Renee Gladman, Yve Laris Cohen, among others. She is the curator of a multi-year public art presentation for the City of West Hollywood’s digital billboard, featuring animation by Eve Fowler, Aimee Goguen, Jacolby Satterwhite, and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.
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 is the Arts & Culture Editor for Transgender Studies Quartlerly.
Jeanne serves on the advisory board of LGBT Community Center National History Archive, developing collections policies with an emphasis on racial justice. With AJ Lewis she co-founded and co-directs the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive organized in partnership with the New York Public Library. Jeanne served as Lead Story Producer for The Center’s documentary about the Stonewall riots and as the Archivist for the FX | Hulu series PRIDE. She has juried exhibitions, residencies, and awards for organizations including Wendy’s Subway and Creative Capital, and was a curatorial advisor on the photography bienniale FotoFest.