Non-Consensual Collaboration: A Roundtable with Jennifer Doyle and Aliza Shvarts

How do we make art, and sense, out of the often-uninvited things that happen to us? Choices in conditions not of our choosing? Please join us for a reading of Jennifer Doyle's "Letting Go," an account of the experience of being a stalking and harassment victim; a screening of Aliza Shvarts’ film Nonconsensual Collaborations, which documents performances with artists who did not agree to their participation; and a moderated discussion with Barbara Browning in which we explore different tactics for truth-telling and truth-shifting, as well as how narrative strategies can enact a reparative process. 

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Campus Sex/Campus Security (2015) and Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013). She is currently finishing a collection of essays on paranoia, harassment and grief: this reading is drawn from that manuscript. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera, for the Vincent Price Art Museum. She is also the curator of “The Tip of Her Tongue,” a feminist performance art series presented by The Broad Museum, in Los Angeles. She is a member of the Board of Directors at Human Resources, Los Angeles, a space dedicated to performance-based and interdisciplinary experimental art.

Barbara Browning is Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her BA, MA and PhD are from Yale University. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Women & Performance. Her academic publications include Samba: Resistance in Motion, Infectious Rhythm, and Caetano Veloso: A Foreign Sound. Recently, her work has turned to intermedia fiction/performance, including novels with ancillary videos and dances (The Correspondence Artist, I’m Trying to Reach You, and The Gift), and collaborative writings and live performances with Sébastien Régnier, aka Imre Lodbrog. 

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and writer whose current work focuses on testimony. She received a BA from Yale University (2008) and is completing a PhD in Performance Studies, NYU. She was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014-2015 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and is currently a 2019-20 A.I.R. Artist Fellow and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is also full-time Faculty at Sotheby’s Institute of Art – New York.

This event is made possible with the generous support of the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research and the Dean’s Office, the Department of Performance Studies, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory   

Reception to follow the event.