Details

First Name

Aliza

Last Name

Edelman

Username

alizae

Bio

Dr. Aliza Edelman is an independent curator, art historian, and editor. Her research interests span the modern Americas and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the art of the postwar United States and Brazil, the transnational histories of abstraction and concretism, and gender and feminism. In New York, she organized two historical surveys on Judith Lauand, a pioneer of postwar Latin American concretism, and the only female member of São Paulo’s Grupo Ruptura in the 1950s. Aliza recently contributed two essays to the exhibition catalogue Judith Lauand: Desvio Concreto that accompanied the major 2023 retrospective on the artist at MASP in São Paulo; she also analyzed Lauand’s 1954 sketchbook drawings for the collected volume, Purity is a Myth: Materiality in Concrete Art in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, published by the Getty Research Institute and Getty Conservation Institute in 2021. Recently, for the 2022 Bloomsbury volume, Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, she focused on two contemporary artists, the Iranian artist Bahar Behbahani and the Israeli artist Keren Anavy, whose interdisciplinary practices in painting, installation, and video negotiate the contested ecological and gendered spaces of the garden.  She earned her doctorate in modern and contemporary art history and her certificate in curatorial studies from Rutgers University, and her BA from Smith College. Her dissertation focused on the material and popular culture related to the rise of the postwar Modern Woman and Abstract Expressionism. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the Woman’s Art Journal, a peer-reviewed journal with a distinguished editorial board, publishing high-quality feminist art-historical scholarship for five decades addressing issues relating to women as artists, patrons, models, subjects, art historians, and art-world professionals within a robust feminist theoretical framework.

Country of residence

United States (US)