Aliza Shvarts,
2025

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. 

Shvarts received her BA (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies (with distinction) at New York University, where her dissertation received the Monroe Lippman Memorial Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation. Other awards include 2008 Lloyd Mifflin Prize for English at Yale, 2017 Franco Coli Dissertation Award from NYU, and 2019 Young Scholar Award from the International Association for Aesthetics. Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014-2015 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015-2019), a 2019-20 A.I.R. Gallery Artist Fellow, and 2020 Artist Fellow at the National Arts Club.

In addition to her artistic practice and scholarship, Shvarts has over a decade of leadership experience focused on reimagining artist education and cultural institutions. She served as Director of Artist Initiatives at Creative Capital, overseeing their grantmaking, educational, and community programs; cofounded the Arts Research Collective (ARC), an incubator for experimental and socially engaged arts education; and developed queer theory curriculum as faculty for the Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship. Shvarts has lectured and taught at institutions including Harvard University, Brown University, Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, Sotheby's Institute of Art-New York, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is currently Director of the Low-Residency MFA Program and Assistant Professor of Performance at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

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