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People  •  Art + Design  •  Teaching Professor

Amy Bryzgel

Departments

Art + Design

Education

  • PhD, Rutgers University, 2008

Awards

  • Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship, 2014
  • Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2013
  • Latvian State Culture Capital Fund, 2011

Professional Experience

  • Member of the editorial collective of ArtMargins Online (since 2022)
  • European Research Council expert
  • Corpus Mundi editorial board, 2020-present
  • EEPS (East European Politics and Societies) Advisory Committee, 2020-present
  • Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, 2017-present
  • I have reviewed funding applications for the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) (2017-present), Scottish Universities Insight Institute Knowledge Exchange Programme, European Research Council, and the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Science
  • I have reviewed articles for Art Journal, The Russian Review, Public Art Dialogue, Journal of Baltic Studies, The Third Text, East Central Europe Review, East European Politics and Society and Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History
  • I have reviewed book proposals for MIT Press, University of Chicago Press, Manchester University Press and Transnational Press London
  • I have been an external tenure reviewer for Syracuse University, The Courtauld Institute of Art (promotions) and the University of Tel Aviv

Research Focus

  • Performance Art
  • Socially Engaged Art
  • Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe

Bryzgel’s research is focused on performance art in East-Central Europe, including body art, participatory and socially engaged art. She is the author of three books on the topic: Her first book, Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 (IB Tauris, 2013) focused on case studies of six artists in three countries working both during and after the communist period. Her second book, Miervaldis Polis, was published in Latvian in Riga, Latvia by Neputns in 2015. It is the first monograph on contemporary painter and performance artist Miervaldis Polis. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, her third book, was published by Manchester University Press as part of its “Rethinking Art’s Histories” series in 2017. It is the first comprehensive academic study of performance art as it developed in the former communist countries of East-Central Europe. 
 
Bryzgel joined Northeastern in 2022 from The University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where she was Personal Chair in Film and Visual Culture. At Northeastern, her teaching focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Her teaching combines theory and practice and engages with the concept of ‘knowing from the inside’ by having students become creators of the art they are studying. 
 
She is a member of the editorial collective of ArtMargins Online, a publication focused on art from Eastern Europe. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Peer Review Council, responsible for reviewing grant applications. She has supervised four PhD students to completion and is currently supervising three PhDs as a co-supervisor/2nd supervisor at the University of Glasgow, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Utrecht.

Bryzgel’s research is focused on performance art in East-Central Europe, including body art, participatory and socially engaged art. She is the author of three books on the topic: Her first book, Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 (IB Tauris, 2013) focused on case studies of six artists in three countries working both during and after the communist period. Her second book, Miervaldis Polis, was published in Latvian in Riga, Latvia by Neputns in 2015. It is the first monograph on contemporary painter and performance artist Miervaldis Polis. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, her third book, was published by Manchester University Press as part of its “Rethinking Art’s Histories” series in 2017. It is the first comprehensive academic study of performance art as it developed in the former communist countries of East-Central Europe.

Bryzgel joined Northeastern in 2022 from The University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where she was Personal Chair in Film and Visual Culture. At Northeastern, her teaching focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on Eastern Europe. Her teaching combines theory and practice, and engages with the concept of ‘knowing from the inside’ by having students become creators of the art they are studying.

She is a member of the editorial collective of ArtMargins Online, a publication focused on art from Eastern Europe. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Peer Review Council, responsible for reviewing grant applications. She has supervised four PhD students to completion and is currently supervising three PhDs as a co-supervisor/2nd supervisor at the University of Glasgow, University of Amsterdam, and the University of Utrecht.

Research/Publications Highlights

Books:

Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester University Press, “Rethinking Art’s Histories” series; 2017)
Miervaldis Polis (Riga, Latvia: Neputns, 2015)
Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 (IB Tauris, 2013)

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles:

“Performance Art in Eastern Europe: 1960s to the post-communist era,” Performance Art Journal 42/3 (Spring 2020), 95-105.
“The Methods and Meanings of Performance Art in Central and Eastern Europe,” Institute of the Present (2020)
“Life in Post-Totalitarian East-Central Europe and the Problems of Participation,” Contemporary Theatre Review—Interventions (August 2019)
“Freedom to Engage: Participatory Art in Communist Central and Eastern Europe,” Contemporary Theatre Review 29/2 (August 2019): 180-196.
“Against Ephemerality: Performing for the Camera in Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary Central and East European Studies 27/1 (July 2019): 7-27.
Artistic Re-Enactments in Central and Eastern European Performance Art since 1970,” ArtMargins Online (2017)
“In Cautarea Noului : Performance in Fosta Iugoslavie ” [“In Search of the New: Performance Art in the Former Yugoslavia”]. Arta: Revista de Arte Vizuale 14-15 (2015): 10.
“Continuity and Change: Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960,” Idea 45 (Autumn 2014): 109-160.

Peer Reviewed Chapters in Edited Volumes:  

“Performative Arts,” entry in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture, vol 2, ed. Martin Hand and Barry Sandywell (commissioned, forthcoming, 2024)
“Performance Art in Eastern Europe,” in Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, eds. Routledge Companion to Performance Art (Routledge, under contract, forthcoming 2023).
“Mapping the Emerging Historiographies of Performance Art in East-Central Europe,” in Tancredi Gusman, ed., Reconstructing Performance Art: Practices of Historicisation , Documentation and Representation (Routledge, forthcoming 2023).
“Performance Art in the Global Flow of Cultural Goods: Some Eastern European Positions,” in East European Art Seen from a Global Perspective, edited by Anu Allas and Beata Hock (Routledge Research in Art History, 2018), 187-201.
“Gender, Feminism, and the Second Public Sphere in East European Performance Art,” in Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere, edited by Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 167-183.

Book and Exhibition Reviews:  

What Will Be Already Exists: Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central and Beyond edited by Emese Kurti (Transcript Verlag, 2021) Slavic Review (forthcoming, 2022)
Marko Ilic, A Slow Burning Fire: the Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia (MIT Press, 2021) and Jasmina Tumbas , “I Am Yugoslovenka ” Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2022), Art Journal (forthcoming, 2022)
Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965-1981 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), in The Burlington Magazine 162/1403 (February 2020).
Review of Left Performance Histories, nGkB Berlin, curated by Judit Bodor, Adam Czirak , Astrid Hackel, Beata Hock, Andrej Mircev , Angelika Richter, 3 February–25 March 2018, CAA Reviews (commissioned review), May 16, 2019.

PhD Students — Completed

Keava McMillan (2016-2017), Queer Narratives of Weimar Germany, awarded 2016

Denisa Tomkova (2015-2019), Biopolitical Art as Art of Participation in Post-communist Eastern Europe, awarded 2019

Jasmina Zaloznik (2014-2021), Claiming the Space of Documentation and of Contemporary Art: Performance, the Performative and Choreographic Logics, awarded 2021

Camilla Salvaneschi (2017-2021), Archives of Contemporary Art Journals, awarded 2021     PhD Students — Current

Dorothe Orczyk , (2021-2027, part-time), Feminist Art in Poland, then and Now , co-supervisor with Dr.

Christa-Maria Lerm -Hayes at the University of Amsterdam

Peter Tuka (2020-2023), Julius Koller, University of Glasgow School of Culture & Creative Arts (co-supervisor with Dr Deborah Lewer, University of Glasgow), SGSAH-funded

Joanna Mardal (2021-2024), University of Utrecht (second supervisor)

Courses Taught

  • ARTH2211 Contemporary Art and Design
  • ARTH2212 Survey of the Still and Moving Image
  • ARTH3000 Topics in Art History: Performance Art