Jenni Sorkin

Jenni Sorkin is a critic and PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on the confluence of women, artistic labor, and craft pedagogy, titled Live Form: Gender and the Performance of Craft, 1940-1970. Previously, she has worked as an independent curator and in the curatorial departments at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the New Art Examiner, Art Journal, Art Monthly, NU: The Nordic Art Review, Modern Painters, and Third Text. She writes regularly for Frieze magazine, and has written numerous in-depth catalog essays on feminist topics and artists such as Judy Chicago, Linda Montano, Barbara T. Smith, and Joan Snyder. She has been a visiting critic at Cal Arts, Ohio University, SVA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. Exhibitions curated include: High Performance: The First Five Years, 1978-1982 (LACE, Los Angeles, 2003) and Judy Chicago: Minimalism, 1965-1973 (LewAllen Gallery, Santa Fe, 2004). Recent publications include features on Kihinde Wiley and Zoe Leonard in Frieze; a tribute to the feminist art critic Arlene Raven in Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture; and The Virgin-Whore Complex: 1970s Feminism and Ms. 45 (1981), an essay on slasher films for the exhibition catalog If Looks Could Kill: Fashion in Film Festival (Central St. Martins, London, 2008). She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2004, she was the recipient of the Art Journal Award.