Jamal Batts joins Art and Art History Department as the IDEAL Provostial Fellow

The Department of Art and Art History is delighted to have Jamal Batts as its Ideal Provostial Fellow.

Jamal Batts, PhD, is a scholar, writer, and curator from Virginia Beach, VA. His work reflects on the relationship between Black queer contemporary visual art and the intricacies of sexual risk. Recently, he curated the 2022 University of Pennsylvania MFA thesis exhibition, Imperative of Struggle. His writing appears in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series.

Batts is a 2021-22 University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, a former Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, a Center for Curatorial Leadership Mellon Seminar Member, a 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have organized four seasons of black experimental film screenings and published three edited collections. In 2019 he curated film screenings and conducted artist discussions for the SFMOMA exhibition SOFT POWER. Batts received his PhD from the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.