Prof T.J. Demos
BA Modern Philosophy and Music Cum Laude, DePaul University, Chicago (USA); MA Modern European and American Art and Critical Theory, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (USA); PhD, Columbia University, New York City (USA).
Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History, Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos’s award-winning writing spans the intersecting fields of art history, contemporary art, visual culture and ecology, as well as global and environmental politics.
Demos is the author of, inter alia, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg, 2023); Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). Demos co-edited The Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021); was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020); and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project ‘Beyond the End of the World’ (2019-2021).
He is Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence programme at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon. In 2014, Demos was awarded the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.
In his capacity as curator, Demos co-curated the exhibition Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organised the Specters: A Ciné-Politics of Haunting exhibition, shown at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014. Demos has served on the Art Journal editorial board (2004-2008) and currently sits on the editorial board of Third Text, and on the advisory board of Grey Room. During 2018-2020, with the Center for Creative Ecologies, Demos worked on ‘Beyond the End of the World’ – a Mellon-funded research project, series of art exhibitions, and book project dedicated to the questions: ‘What comes after the end of the world? And how can we cultivate futures of social justice within capitalist ruins?’