Elise Armani - Writer, Curator, Ph.D. Candidate Art History

She studies modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on immigrant artists working in the United States. Her research interests include exhibition histories, public art, urbanism, and migration. Her dissertation centers a network of migrant artists on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s, framing their convergence through interrelated histories of immigration policy and neighborhood change. Through examining the artists' aesthetic and material integration of urban architecture in their work, the project explores how artistic practice was entwined with the cultivation of a communitarian ethos for migrant artists on the LES, whilst considering the ways creative production was implicated in both the advancing and subverting of logics of neighborhood destruction, displacement, and gentrification.

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She holds a B.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies and a B.F.A. in Art from the University of Minnesota, as well as an M.A. in Art History from Stony Brook University. 

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Elise has contributed to curatorial projects at TANK Shanghai, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Weisman Art Museum. She recently co-curated Revisiting 5+1 at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, presented in partnership with the MFA Boston, and co-edited the accompanying catalog.

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