Engineered Relations: Artist-Built Performance Systems and the Infrastructures of Intermedia, 1960s–Now
Supervisor: Dr Lucy Bradnock
Advisor: Dr Johanna Gosse
Funded by The Courtauld Scholarship
My research looks at the systems artists build to make performance and intermedia possible. Beginning in the 1960s and extending to the present, my PhD, Engineered Relations: Artist-Built Performance Systems and the Infrastructures of Intermedia, 1960s–Now, examines scores, instructions, rehearsal structures, technical protocols, contracts, archives and institutional frameworks not simply as things that surround artworks, but as artistic material in their own right. I am interested in what happens when we shift our attention from the event or object to the structures that allow it to happen: who coordinates it, who maintains it, how responsibility is distributed, and what survives once the performance is over.
Moving from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and the performance and conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s to artists working today, including Pope.L, Clifford Owens, Martine Syms, and Tino Sehgal, my research traces how artists have built systems for organizing performance, collaboration, and participation. Rather than treating these systems as background conditions, I consider scores, instructions, rehearsal structures, technical protocols, contracts, and institutional frameworks as part of the artistic work itself. Across these practices, the project asks how such often overlooked structures shape authorship, participation, responsibility, care, and the ways performance is documented, circulated, and remembered.
My research grows directly out of my work as an artist, curator and organizer. I am the founder and director of Central Server Works, an artist-run gallery, publishing imprint and cultural organization, and have previously held curatorial and directorial positions at Art + Practice, Various Small Fires, Jeffrey Deitch. Across these roles I have developed exhibitions, publications and public programs with artists and institutions including the Getty Research Institute, Hammer Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art. This experience has made the practical life of artworks central to my research: how exhibitions are produced, how artists work with fabricators and institutions, how performances are rehearsed and documented, and how temporary or collaborative practices eventually enter archives and histories.
Archival research is an important part of this work. I was a 2025 Archives Research Resident at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, where I researched Rauschenberg, Experiments in Art and Technology, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Billy Klüver and histories of artist-engineer collaboration. I am also a 2026 Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery, where my research considers postwar British sculpture, performance and artist-built systems, with particular attention to Rose Finn-Kelcey and John Newling.
Alongside my research and curatorial practice, I am an artist working across performance, installation, painting, sound and moving image, and a writer whose criticism has appeared in Hyperallergic.
Education
PhD History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2026–
MFA Fine Art, Claremont Graduate University, 2024–26
MA Arts Management, Claremont Graduate University, 2024–26
BA English Literature, California State University, Los Angeles, 2017–19
Research and Artistic Residencies
Research Fellow, Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery, 2026–27
Artist-in-Residence, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, 2026
Archives Research Resident, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2025
UNIDEE Residency Programs, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, 2025
Publications
“A Los Angeles Residency Envisions a Radical Future for Experimental Art” Hyperallergic, March 2024
“A New California Center Is Building a Legacy of Black Photographers” Hyperallergic, August 2022
“Uncovering Hidden Spaces at UCI’s Open Studios” Hyperallergic, June 2022
Foreword with Sophia Belsheim, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, ed. Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody and Glenn Phillips, X Artists’ Books, 2021
Teaching
Teaching Assistant, Exhibiting Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2026–27
Teaching Assistant, Print Media, Claremont Graduate University, 2025–26
Selected Exhibitions and Programs Organized and Curated
Regarding Structures: Lenard Smith, AIPAD Photography Show, New York, 2026. Curator
Bossmom: Elena Roznovan, NADA New York, New York, 2026. Curator
Regarding Structures: Lenard Smith, NADA Miami, Miami Beach, 2025. Curator
Sunrise/Sunset: Madeline Hollander, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2022. Curator.
The Rhythm of Vision: George Clinton and Lauren Halsey, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2022. Curator.
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, Art + Practice with the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2021–22. Organized and Curated Program Series.
Exploring the Archives: The Archive in Exhibition Making, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, 2021. Curator.
Collective Constellation: Selections from the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, Art + Practice with the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2020–21. Organized and Curated Program Series.
Research Interests
Performance, intermedia and conceptual art from the 1960s
Fluxus and experimental performance practices
Artist-engineer collaborations
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
Scores, scripts and rule-based artistic practices
Artist-built systems and performance infrastructures
Rehearsal, delegation and distributed authorship
Technical protocols
Contracts and commissioning structures
Artist-led organizations
Alternative institutional models
Archives and the preservation of performance
Curatorial practice and exhibition-making
Artist publishing and publishing as artistic infrastructure
Black and African diasporic performance and conceptual practices
Participation, care, maintenance and collective forms of artistic production
