Queer Communion: Ron Athey with Amelia Jones

(b. 1961) identifies as a self-taught artist, having, since 1980, life of experience in Los Angeles post-punk performance scenes. He has collaborated with performers, visual artists, and opera directors, participated in philosophy seminars, and has visiting artist teaching history at Cal Arts, Roski, UCLA, and Queen Mary University, London. Recent projects include, among others, Acephalous Monster at Performance Space NY, as well as community-based projects such as Gifts of the Spirit, a collectively authored automatic writing opera. Athey has received numerous grants and fellowships, most recently the Harpo Foundation Fellowship 2021. Upcoming projects include a live art/video production in collaboration with Hermes Pittakos, The Asclepeion.

Art historian, critic, and curator Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics & Research in Roski School of Art & Design at USC. Amelia is the curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History at the Hammer Museum and most recently Queer Communion: Ron Athey at Participant, Inc., New York and ICA, Los Angeles. Recent publications include In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (Routledge Press, 2021), the anthology Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (Routledge Press, 2012).