Ivana Dizdar is an art historian and a residential fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She specializes in nineteenth-century visual culture and its intersections with geopolitics, science, law, environment, and animal history.
She recently held visiting research positions in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and at the Musée d'Orsay, where she conducted research toward her dissertation on representations of the Arctic in nineteenth-century Paris. She has given talks on this subject at Boston University, Durham University, Yale University, the University of Oslo, Cambridge University, Brown University, and the New York Public Library, among other venues. Her most recent essay “A Postmortem Biography, or, The Adventures of a Snowy Owl,” written with Rachael DeLue, appears in the latest issue of Grey Room.
Dizdar is also active as a curator of modern and contemporary art, with a special interest in performance and activism. Most recently, she organized Canadian performance art trio the Clichettes’ first retrospective, at the McMaster Museum of Art (2024), and was the editor of a full-length catalogue about the artists. The Literary Review of Canada described the publication as “a beautiful book as smart and entertaining as the three women it showcases." Previously, Dizdar was Curatorial Assistant in Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada, where she worked on the retrospective General Idea (Ottawa, 2022), which traveled to the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2023) and the Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2023-24). Other major exhibitions include The Milk of Dreams (the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022), Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, 2022), Jeff Koons: Lost in America at Qatar Museums (Doha, 2021-22), and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2018-19).
Her own performances and videos have appeared in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including venues in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Mirroring neocolonial practice in the spheres of art, business, and politics, her eponymous performance persona runs a multi-million dollar commercial gallery franchise expanding through the so-called Global South.