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TINA RIVERS RYAN, Ph.D.

Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian and curator specializing in art since the 1960s.
Although broadly trained in Western art, her particular expertise is in the field of media art, including video, digital, and internet art.

Throughout her career, Dr. Ryan has worked with some of the world's leading art institutions and organizations, including The Met, MoMA, and Artforum. She holds five degrees in art history, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia.

Curator

Since 2017, Dr. Ryan has been Assistant Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, where her projects have included (with Paul Vanouse) the major fall 2021 survey Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, the first solo museum show of Aria Dean, and (under Chief Curator Cathleen Chaffee) Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective. Previously, she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she worked on a half-dozen shows, including Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms and Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980. Before joining The Met, she held internships at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and the ICA Boston, among other institutions. Her writing has been commissioned for catalog essays and research projects by various museums including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Dia in New York, and Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.

Critic

Since 2013, Dr. Ryan has worked as an art critic, writing primarily for Artforum and focusing on artists who make works with or about media technologies, including Trevor Paglen, Pipilotti Rist, Stan Douglas, and Caitlin Cherry. She also has produced interviews, obituaries, and essays for publications including Art in America, Even, and Document.

Historian

Dr. Ryan's research has appeared in academic journals (such as Art Journal and Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media), as well as in anthologies from university presses. In recent years, she has given invited lectures at schools including NYU, RISD, and the University of St. Andrews. She also has presented her work at conferences from Los Angeles to Karlsruhe. In 2020, she joined the Editorial Board of Media-N, the Journal of the New Media Caucus. Her current book project, “McLuhan’s Bulbs: Light Art and the Dawn of New Media,” examines the light art of the 1960s as a fulcrum between the discourses of “medium" and “media” in postwar art. Her research generally foregrounds the relationship between technology and the body, informed by her own experience of disability.

Educator and Public Speaker

An experienced educator, Dr. Ryan has taught courses on contemporary art at Columbia University, the Pratt Institute, and The Museum of Modern Art. She is also co-host of the top-ranked podcast Art History Happy Hour (which ran from 2014-2016 under the name "State of the Arts"). As a professional public speaker, she has offered accessible, entertaining lectures on art to adults in more than fifty cities internationally. For private bookings for corporate and social events online or in person, please use the Contact page.