bio

Dr. Jessi DiTillio is a curator, writer, and art historian based in Los Angeles, where she works at the Hammer Museum. She researches American Art with a focus on critical race theory, affect , gender and sexuality, and the politics of difference. She earned her PhD in the Department of Art + Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation about parody as a tool for rewriting art history. She is the curator and a co-founding member of Thunderstruck Collective, a group of artists and writers making exhibitions and publications about land art in the American Southwest.

She was a 2019-2020 Luce/ACLS American Art Dissertation Fellow and has held curatorial fellowships at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, the Art Galleries at Black Studies, and The Contemporary Austin. While in Austin, she was a co-founding member of Neon Queen Collective, a platform for promoting feminist artists of color. Before beginning her doctoral program, she served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and Interim Director of the Association for Academic Museums and Galleries.