Jessica Santone Faculty Profile

Photo of Jessica Santone

Jessica  Santone

Associate Professor

Department of Art

Jessica Santone teaches courses on contemporary art and visual studies, primarily from North America. She often approaches art with particular attention to the socio-cultural circumstances of the work's making and its reception. As a result, she's interested in a number of important interpretive lenses in relation to recent art practice, including: environmental humanities, feminist theory, critical race art history, phenomenology, and new materialism. While her courses survey a broad range of art and design practices, Santone favors performance art, social practice, installation, public art, media art, and forms of visual activism. Her teaching emphasizes active and embodied learning; critical reading and writing; and skill development over content-based learning. Recent course topics have included: Climate Emergency & Environmental JusticeMedia Art & MediationArt & Publics, and Pedagogical Art & Social Practice; she regularly teaches Race and Representation in American Art as well.

Recent research has focused on pedagogical art (when teaching and learning become the forms and/or topics of performance and social practice), and follows from many years of studying performance art and its documentation and audiences. Building on new work developed during a 2022-23 sabbatical research fellowship in "Art, Data, and Environment/s," funded by the National Science Foundation, and based at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Jessica is currently developing a book that examines and pedagogical art related to science and climate. By tackling science and climate topics through their social projects, performances, and networks, artists aim to challenge dominant ways of knowing; they invite participating publics to consider feminist, queer, or anti-colonial approaches to science and environment; they blur disciplinary boundaries of knowledge; and they question how people come to know about the world around them, ultimately expanding publics of both art engagement and environmental studies.