DeVaan, Juliana

Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in United States history at Columbia, where she studies 20th-century cultural and intellectual history. Her dissertation, “Performance Testing: Experimental Art and the Emergent Aesthetics of Neoliberalism,” is a materialist cultural history of the avant-garde in New York during the late 20th century.

Her work has been supported by the New York State Archives, New York Public Library, Getty Research Institute, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, among other institutions. You can read Juliana’s writing in Public Books, Jacobin, and The Drift. 

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.