Dis…Miss Gender? Artists and Writers on Gender Today

The new book Dis...Miss Gender? features a bold mix of photographs and short essays in which artists, writers, and theorists celebrate the rapidly evolving world of gender. The book's editor and several contributors will discuss intersectionality, queer thought, fourth-wave feminism, and more. 

Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose work focuses on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world whose writing and commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. She is assistant professor of African American Art at UCLA and the recipient of the Smithsonian's 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director's Essay Prize.

Anne Bray, editor of Dis...Miss Gender?, works at the intersection of public space and media art as a hybrid artist and director of the nonprofit public arts organization, LA Freewaves. Engagement with edgy, demanding, clarifying art by a broad public is Bray's mission. As a lecturer, she taught graduate seminars for 25 years in the new genre arts at Claremont plus media art and public art at USC. Her recent awards include the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship, Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Cultural Trailblazer award, NEA Our Town grant, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant. 

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Recent publications include the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey, co-edited with Andy Campbell, and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. She is currently writing a book entitled Cultural Capitalism, which addresses the structural racism and neoliberalism of the twenty-first century art world and university, as well as organizing a survey exhibition of the work of Ken Gonzales-Day.

Young Joon Kwak is an L.A.-based multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans sculpture, performance, video, sound, and community-based collaborations. They are founder of Mutant Salon and lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. They received an MFA from USC, an MA in Humanities from University of Chicago, and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are Visiting Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. 

Moderator: Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society. As a hybrid scholar/practitioner, she studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media and integrates critical theory and media production using video, still images, and sound as forms of critical making.