Natalie E. Phillips
Contemporary Art Historian
Visual Studies Scholar
Community Arts Organizer
Natalie E. Phillips
Contemporary Art Historian
Visual Studies Scholar
Community Arts Organizer
About Natalie E. Phillips
Natalie E. Phillips is Associate Professor of Art History, Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, and Affiliate Research Faculty in African American Studies at Ball State University. She received her Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine in 2009, and specializes in contemporary art and critical theory, with a focus on New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s including artists such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her other academic interests include feminist art, performance, art and the atomic bomb, and the intersections between contemporary art and religion. She has published in journals such as American Art, Religion and the Arts, and Woman’s Art Journal, and is currently writing a book tentatively titled My Mouth/ Therefore an Error: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Modes of Resistance.
Her book Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, co-edited with Grant Hamming from Virginia Tech, will be published by Routledge in the fall of 2024. The volume features interdisciplinary essays by 22 scholars on all aspects of visual culture.
Dr. Phillips is actively engaged in her local community, serving as the Coordinator of Muncie, Indiana’s First Thursday celebrations, a monthly gallery crawl throughout the downtown area. She is also the Vice-President of the Vore Arts Fund, an experimental micro-loan program designed to help fund the work of artists in the Muncie area.