Natalie Loveless

is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture division of the Department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta, located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty Six territory, where she also directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, and co-leads the Faculty of Arts’ Signature Area in Research-Creation.

Research: Loveless is author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), and co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020). Recent projects include New Maternalisms, a project bringing together feminist art practice, theory and curation, and an interdisciplinary collaborative project on global vaccination called <Immune Nations> that culminated in a high-profile exhibition at UNAIDS in Geneva during the 2017 World Health Assembly. The project is archived in <ImmuneNations>: Research-Creation at the Intersection of Vaccine Science and Global Health Policy, a guest-edited issued of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, and is in the planning stages of a post-COVID “reboot” scheduled for September 2021 at the McMaster Museum of Art. She is currently working on a collaborative interdisciplinary curatorial project called Speculative Energy Futures, part of the Just Powers initiative funded by the Future Energy Systems Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance Art (2022).

Fellowships and Awards: Loveless has held fellowships and visiting positions in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University in Montreal, the Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, and Western University. In 2017 she was awarded the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award (Early Achievement), and in 2020 was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists) for her scholarship at the intersection of research-creation and social and ecological justice.

Education and Training: Loveless completed a PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2010) under the supervision of Donna Haraway (where she also had the opportunity to learn from and study with Catherine Soussloff, Hayden White, Jim Clifford, Teresa de Lauretis, David Mariott, and Angela Davis, as well as under Rosi Braidotti, as a research fellow, during the final year of her dissertation). Prior to this, she completed two masters degrees, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004) under the supervision of Marilyn Arsem (with Jane Hudson and Fritz Buehner as supervisory committee members, and the significant influence of SA Bachman), and an MA in Contemporary Art History and Theory at Tufts University (2004) under the supervision of Eric Rosenberg (with Lee Edelman and Madeleine Caviness on the supervisory committee, and with key lessons from Maura Reilly).