Joseph Shaikewitz

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: Modern art; Latin America and the Caribbean; gender and sexuality studies; trans visual culture.

Joseph Shaikewitz is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, where they study twentieth-century art and its intersections with feminist, queer, and trans practices. Their dissertation, “Incongruent, Incomprehensible: Travesti-Trans Aesthetic Imaginings in Latin America, 1900–1960,” charts a visual history of gender-variant life and self-imagining in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Havana.

Joseph has presented their research at the College Art Association Annual Conference, Association for Latin American Art Triennial Conference, Annual Symposium of Latin American Art, and Stanford Humanities Center’s Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies Colloquium. Their writing appears in such publications as Art Papers, ASAP/J, Hemisphere: Visual Culture of the Americas, small axe salon, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art’s online editorials. Prior to joining the IFA, Joseph was a Curatorial Assistant for the Arts of the Americas and Europe at the Brooklyn Museum.