Katherine Guinness
is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Director of Art History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), where she also served as the academic director of the downtown Gallery of Contemporary Art (or GOCA). She received her PhD from the University of Manchester and is the author of the first academic monograph on German artist Rosemarie Trockel, Schizogenesis, which was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019, and is co-author of The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2024. She has been a guest editor for Art Journal Open and is the co-founder of FEARS, the Female Emerging Artist Residency Series, at UCCS.
Katherine has taught in a wide range of departments and programs across the globe, including the University of Sydney (where she taught a class in “Digital Arts” in their Digital Cultures program), the University of New South Wales (where she taught Architectural History), North Carolina State University (where she taught in their Art History and Women’s and Gender Studies programs), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where she taught a number of First Year Seminars in Art History). She is interested in many topics within contemporary art, all of which she examines with a feminist lens, and is currently working on projects that include: the relation between anesthetics and the history of aesthetic theory; “zaniness” in contemporary Australian performance and video art; death, immortality and digital media in the work of a number of younger video artists; and a project on the political economy and visual culture of social media influencers.
The above image is a meme by @cyborg.asm on Instagram, referencing the article “Do You Really Want to Live Forever,” which was coauthored with Grant Bollmer. The original meme can be found here and the article can be found here.
CONTACT
OTHER WRITINGS
Academic journal articles, book chapters, catalog essays, arts writing, etc. Links to digital copies of these can be found here, if available.︎ Return to Main Page
Academic Journal Articles
Guinness, Katherine, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga. “Collaborative Reflections on the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative,” OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, 4 (2021). [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Negative Hauntology and the Nuclear Sublime: On VR and Catastrophe,” Spectator 40:2 (2020), 31-39. [link]
Bollmer, Grant and Katherine Guinness. “Empathy and Nausea: Virtual Reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence,” Journal of Visual Culture 19:1 (2020), 28-46. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “The Coloniser and Corpus Nullius,” parallax 26:1 (2020), 76-88. [link]
Bollmer, Grant and Katherine Guinness. “‘Do You Really Want to Live Forever?’: Animism, Death, and the Trouble of Digital Images,” Cultural Studies Review 24:2 (2018), 79-96. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Hard at Play: Zaniness and Labour in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18:1 (2018), 90-107. [link] Recipient of the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand (AAANZ) Best Scholarly Article in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Prize, 2019
Bollmer, Grant and Katherine Guinness. “Phenomenology for the Selfie,” Cultural Politics 13:2 (2017), 156-176. [link]
Guinness, Katherine and Grant Bollmer. “Marina Abramović Doesn’t Feel Like You,” Feral Feminisms 3 (2015), 46-61. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Desiring and Destruction: Rosemarie Trockel’s Painting Machine,” NYX: A Noctournal 7 (2012), 93-100.
Catalog Essays
Guinness, Katherine. “For No Given Reason,” This:That: William Wylie and Corey Drieth (Charlottesville and Colorado Springs: University of Virginia and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, 2021), 9-31. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “The Vegetal World,” Family Tree Whakapapa: Elin, Madeleine, Sarah, and Susanne Slavick (Auckland and Masterton, New Zealand: Wallace Arts Trust and Aratoi - Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, 2021), 3-9. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Heath Franco’s LIFE IS SEXY,” The National (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, 2017). [link]
Arts Writing
Guinness, Katherine. “Collaborations – A Formless Dialectic,” Montclair State University Creative Research Center, September 30, 2019. [link]
The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative: Ana María León, Andrea J. Merrett, Armaghan Ziaee, Catalina Mejía Moreno, Charlotte Kent, Elaine Stiles, Emma Cheatle, Jennifer Y. Chuong, Katherine Guinness, Juliana Maxim, Louisa Iarocci, Martina Tanga, Olga Touloumi, Rebecca Choi, S Surface, Saher Sohail, Sarah Parrish, Tessa Paneth-Pollak. “To Manifest,” Harvard Design Magazine 46 (Winter 2018), 182-189. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Making Kin with Pessimism (and Mushrooms),” Tilt West, October 16, 2018. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “The Future is Already Here, It’s Just the End,” KAPSULA 3 (2016), 8-15. [link] Commissioned through the Lisa Visser Writer’s Fund Award
Guinness, Katherine. “9B and Me (Love, Touch, Destruction),” KAPSULA 2:3 (2015), 6-13. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Does Heath Franco Think I’m a Dickhead? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Art that Makes Me Angry),” KAPSULA 1:4 (2014), 16-19. [link]
Guinness, Katherine. “Celebrating an Unstable Oeuvre: Rosemarie Trockel’s Retrospective,” Esse 80 (2014), 76-81.