Summary
Ian Bourland is a critic, curator and historian who explores the intersection of technology, ecology and empire in global southern and postcolonial contexts. He writes widely about modern and contemporary art, photography, film and new media. Such criticism appears most often in magazines such as Artforum, Aperture and frieze (where he was a contributing editor). In addition to curatorial projects and contributions to a series of catalogues for Phaidon, Ian's scholarship is published in journals such as October, Third Text, American Art, The Art Bulletin, African Art and many others. Book projects include an entry on Massive Attack's Blue Lines for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury 2019) and a monograph on 1980s-era photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode called Bloodflowers (Duke University Press, 2019), which was supported by a Mellon AHPI grant and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His most recent book, Black & Gold—a genealogy of gold mining and the Black Atlantic world—was published in 2026 with the interdisciplinary Africanas series at Penn State University Press.
New projects further explore questions of aesthetic philosophy, museum ethics and the formation of value, especially through histories of mineral extraction and human-altered landscapes. An alumnus of the Whitney ISP (2011), before joining the University of Nevada, Reno community, he was Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University and faculty of Art History & Theory at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2012
- M.A., University of Chicago, 2006
- B.S., Georgetown University, 2004