Eugenia Kisin

Eugenia Kisin is an anthropologist of art whose ethnographic and historical research focuses on the ways that things called "art" come to matter at a nexus of social action, extractive economies, and forms of governance. Through her work with artists and as an editorial adviser at the critical art quarterly C Magazine, Kisin is committed to scholarly and political engagement with the histories and futures of contemporary Indigenous art in North America. Much of her writing is on contemporary First Nations art in British Columbia, and on artists's practices as unsettling forms of sovereignty amidst extractive projects, a phrasing that is meant to implicate art-based knowledge production as well as natural resource extraction. At Gallatin, her teaching and research interests include contemporary art and agency; critical Indigenous philosophies; curatorial practices; visual and sensory research methods; materiality and materialisms; and aesthetics of risk, endangerment, and refusal. As a teacher, she encourages students to think, act, write, and make in grounded and reflexive ways that encompass multiple intersections of aesthetics and politics.