Jordana Moore Saggese

Jordana Moore Saggese is an assistant professor of Visual Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies and the Graduate Program in Fine Arts.

Since 2009 she has served as CCA's faculty mentor to students of color. Trained as an art historian, her work focuses on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on the expressions and theorizations of blackness.

Saggese's writing has appeared in the Grove Dictionary of Art online, Exposure: The Journal of the Society for Photographic Education, and in museum and exhibition catalogs, including Drawings of Choice from a New York Collection (2002) and Krannert Art Museum: Selected Works (2008).

Most recently, her work appeared in Artforum online (2010) and she was an invited contributor to the newest edition of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art (2011). Her article "'Cut and Mix': Jean-Michel Basquiat in Retrospect" will appear in issue no. 29 of nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Saggese has also recently completed her first book manuscript, Notes on Basquiat, which reexamines the painting practice of the often-mythologized 1980s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Saggese's new research concerns the intersections of race and performance art in the late 1970s, a topic closely connected to her teaching in CCA's undergraduate Visual Studies Program. This February she is co-organizing a related panel with CCA faculty member Tina Takemoto at the 99th Annual Conference of the College Art Association (CAA) in New York, entitled "Potentialities of Performance."

For the 2010–11 academic year, Saggese is teaching the following courses: "Contemporary Art History and Theory" (Graduate Fine Arts); "Identities" (Graduate Visual and Critical Studies); "Introduction to the Modern Arts" and "Potentialities of Performance" (Visual Studies); and "Senior Project 2" for Visual Studies majors.

Saggese's other research and teaching interests include critical race art history, identity politics, postcolonial theory, African diaspora theory as well as the intersections between musical, visual, and literary practices.

Outside of CCA, Saggese also serves as coeditor of book reviews for the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA), and is a member of the Committee on Diversity Practices for the College Art Association. Since 2008 she has also held a position on the curatorial committee for the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.

[photo: Jim Norrena]