The Department of Art is excited to announce the appointment of Marisa Williamson as Assistant Professor of Visual Art with a research focus on Blackness.
Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. She has produced site-specific works at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (2013), Storm King Art Center (2016), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016), the University of Virginia (2018), and SPACES Cleveland (2019), and by commission from Monument Lab Philadelphia (2017), and the National Park Service (2019).
Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Artpoetica, SOHO20, and BRIC in Brooklyn, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Mana Contemporary Chicago, Human Resources (LA), and Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato and Stefania Miscetti gallery in and Rome, Italy.
Williamson has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. In addition to being the Ruffin Distinguished Art-in-Residence at UVA in 2018, she has had residencies at Triangle Arts Association, the Shandaken Project, and ACRE. She was a participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2012 and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2014-2015. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from CalArts.
Marisa Williamson will become part of the first cohort of faculty to be hired through a new faculty hiring initiative in the College of Arts and Sciences devoted to Race, Justice and Equity. This initiative builds on a broad range of recent commitments, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project to hire 10 Tenure/Tenure Track faculty working on the Global South; an expansion and University endowment commitment to the Carter Woodson Institute and Department of African and African-American Studies; the establishment of the Dean’s Doctoral Fellowships to enhance our recruitment of underrepresented graduate students; and a parallel new project in collaboration with the Mellon Foundation to appoint 30 Race, Justice, and Equity Postdoctoral and Arts fellows across the University.