Quick Facts
Biography
Amelia Jones (born July 14, 1961) is an American art historian, art critic and curator specializing in feminist art, body/performance art, video art and Dadaism.
Background
Amelia Jones, the daughter of Virginia S. Jones and Princeton Psychology professor Edward E. Jones, studied art history at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from UCLA in 1991.
Career
Jones has taught art history at UC Riverside, was formerly the Pilkington Chair of the art history department at the University of Manchester, where she taught for 6 1/2 years, then the Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montreal for 4 1/2 years. She has also worked as a visiting professor at Maine College of Art, Texas Christian University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Washington University, St. Louis
She is currently the Robert A. Day Chair in Art and Design at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where she is also Vice-Dean of Critical Studies, and in addition is affiliated faculty in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. In 2015, seven students withdrew from the school's MFA program, accusing the school's administration of "dismantling" the faculty, curriculum, program structure and strong support for graduate studies that had been hallmarks of the program. That conflict is ongoing.
With Martha Meskimmon, she co-edits the series Rethinking Art's Histories from Manchester University Press. Jones is the author of numerous books, including Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), and the editor or co-editor of anthologies including the Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (new edition 2010), Sexuality (2014) in the Whitechapel “Documents” series, and, with Adrian Heathfield, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012).
Amelia Jones curated the 1996 exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, at the Hammer Museum. In 1991, she curated The Politics of Difference: Artists Explore Issues of Identity at the UCR/Chandler Art Museum.
In 2013, she curated the exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal.