I am a London-based art historian and curator. My research is interdisciplinary and bridges art history, film & media studies, and visual studies.
I am a Lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I am co-programme lead on Contemporary Art & the Moving Image (CAMI), a new cross-institution MA course offered through the Courtauld and the department of Film Studies at King’s College London. In 2023-24, I was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford.
From 2018-2023, I was Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at the University of Idaho and Executive Editor of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus.
Past publications include Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s (Duke University Press, 2022), which I co-edited with Timothy Stott (Trinity College Dublin), as well as articles and reviews in academic journals, including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, Millennium Film Journal, Art Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, MIRAJ: Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Radical History Review, and Journal of Art & the Public Sphere. I’ve contributed chapters to edited collections such as Black Mountain College as Multiverse (Verlag Kettler, 2022), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 (Yale UP, 2019), Experimental and Expanded Animation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2015). I also regularly contribute essays to exhibition catalogues, including for Call it Something Else, an exhibition on Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press at the Reina Sofia in 2023; four essays for Ray Johnson c/o at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021-22, and the concluding essay in Bruce Conner: It’s All True at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art in 2016.
My current projects are a book that developed from my 2024 Terra Lecture Series in American Art at Oxford on the politics of place in American art in the Vietnam War era, alongside a longstanding project that examines the early work of the queer American artist Ray Johnson, which received an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital. I also regularly curate exhibitions, such as Beyond Hope: Kienholz and the Inland Northwest, which opened at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University in 2024 and was reviewed in caa.reviews.
You can contact me via email at johanna.gosse [at] courtauld [dot] ac [dot] uk.