Jessica Cooley

About the Moderator

Jessica A. Cooley (she/hers) is a scholar-curator working at the intersection of curatorial and museum studies, disability studies and crip theory, and Modern and contemporary art. Cooley holds a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book project centers on what she calls “crip materiality” and will forward a new methodology to address how ableism affects the understanding and valuation of the very fibers of art materials within curatorial and conservation discourses. Cooley was a guest curator for the Ford Foundation Art Gallery in NYC from 2020 – 2022 where she co-curated a multi-year online and physical exhibition titled Indisposable. From 2006–2010, she was the assistant curator at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where she curated numerous exhibitions including RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture. Currently, Cooley is the ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.