Ivana Dizdar is an art historian specializing in nineteenth-century visual and material culture. She has held fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, where she wrote her dissertation on representations of the Arctic in nineteenth-century Paris. She has given talks on this subject at Boston University, Brown University, Yale University, the University of Oslo, Durham University, Cambridge 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.
Also active as a curator of modern and contemporary art, Dizdar recently curated The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs, and Politics at the McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, 2024) and was the editor of its accompanying catalogue. Previously, she 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). She also worked on 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 MoMA (New York, 2018-19).