ABOUT

Joey Orr is the Mellon Curator and director of Arts Research Integration at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, where he serves as affiliate faculty in Museum Studies and Visual Art. Previously, he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where his major project aligned three concurrent exhibitions around artistic research. His curatorial work generally focuses on site specific installation and artistic research collaborations. Recent writing has been published in both edited and peer-reviewed publications, including Art Journal Open, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and Journal of American Studies. His research on performance and social practice has also appeared in the chapter “Collecting Social Things” in the volume Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan) and in his book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor: Activators, Activists, Archives, All, with Routledge Press (2023). He has served in various editorial capacities for many publications, currently as a contributing editor for Art Papers magazine. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University. A founding member of the idea collective, John Q, his collaborative projects explore public intervention, queer memory, and archival practices.