Biography

A respected authority on the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary art, Dr. Leonie Bradbury has 18+ years of experience creating compelling and innovative exhibitions, commissioning artistic works, and promoting artists as thought leaders. She currently serves as the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College, Boston.

Bradbury directs Emerson Contemporary, Emerson College’s platform for showcasing contemporary visual art. It is focused on presenting living artists, their ideas, experiments, and creative practices in the areas of media art, performance art, and emergent technologies, while critically examining these works in their social context. She teaches seminars on moving image work in contemporary art and curating contemporary art.

Recent writings include: “We All Live Our Fictions: Archival Gestures to Remake History,” “The Networked Artwork: The Grid As Dynamic Relational Form?” in The Arts of the Grid: Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts. De Gruyter (2022). Artwork as Network: A Reconceptualization of the Work of Art and its Exhibition (2018). “Infinite Reflection,” in Kelsey Brookes: Psychedelic Space, Ginko Press, 2015. “Sarah Sze’s Random Walk-Drawing: An Encounter with The Hyperreal,” Artcore Journal.

Dr. Bradbury holds a B.A. in the History of Art from the University of Minnesota and a M.A. in the History of Art: 20th Century Art, Theory, and Criticism from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine.