DeVaan, Juliana

Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in United States history at Columbia, where she studies 20th-century cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on dance and performance. She is at work on a dissertation about experimental art in New York City from 1970-1995 that explores how artists blurred boundaries across media, inaugurating a new moment in the history of the avant-garde, and used their craft to investigate social, economic, political, and technological changes of their moment. The project also examines how artists engaged the post-industrial landscape of the city and asks how they were both shaped by and participated in processes of gentrification, marketization, and neoliberalism more broadly.

Her work has been supported by the Lehman Center for American History, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the New York Public Library, and the Getty Research Institute. You can read Juliana’s writing in The Drift and Culturebot, among other publications.

Juliana holds an MA in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2020) and a BA in ethnicity and race studies, and dance from Columbia (2019). She is a dancer who has performed original works by Donald Byrd, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adrienne Truscott, and Kevin Wynn.