Nicole Woods
Assistant Professor, Modern and Contemporary
Concurrent Professor, Gender Studies; Concurrent Professor, Film, Television, and Theater
Area: Art History
Education
Ph.D., University of California at Irvine
M.A., University of California at Irvine
B.A., University of California at Los Angeles
Research Interests
Euro-American neo-avant-gardes, Performance and conceptual art, Intersectional feminism, Critical race theory, Globalism and taste cultures, History of photography and time-based media
Biography
Nicole L. Woods is a historian of modern and contemporary art, criticism, and cultural theory. Her current book project is the first in-depth study of the diverse practice of pioneering Fluxus artist, Alison Knowles (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). She is the scholarly consultant for the premier retrospective of Knowles’s life and work (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, opening July 2022), funded by the Terra Foundation of American Art. A second project surveys the convergence of feminism, political radicalism, and expanded media art practices in the late 1960s-1970s.
Woods’s interdisciplinary approach includes a reexamination of the widespread use of food by artists in the 1970s in the form of political critique, as well as the intersection of modernism, street art, and experimental architecture. She is presently writing on African-American painter Bob Thompson and his role in early Happenings, for which she was awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Her essays and criticism have appeared in Art Journal, Performance Research, X-TRA: A Contemporary Art Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, caa.reviews, and the Walker Art Center.
