Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020). Her writing has appeared in e-flux, Third Text, Afterall, Canadian Art, PhiloSOPHIA, and Camera Obscura, numerous edited books and catalogues, and has been translated into Italian, German, French, Croatian, Slovak, Korean, and Chinese. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and editor of the award-winning Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017). Davis’ work has been supported through numerous fellowships including at the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, a GIDEST faculty fellowship, a residency at the Fondation Grantham, a Mellon Visiting Scholar in the Environmental Humanities at the Center for Environmental Futures, University of Oregon, a Critical Studies Teaching Fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University.
contact: davish1 [at] newschool [dot] edu