Sandra Skurvida, PhD
Education
PhD, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Biography
Dr. Sandra Skurvida is an art historian, writer, and curator practicing at the crossroads of contemporary art and media, feminism, and ecosophy. Her research spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in North America and Europe, with a specific focus on the Baltic region. Her pedagogy seeks to meld art and politics, technology and environmental concerns, and the personal and the communal.
Dr. Skurvida authored a research monograph, John Cage Composing, Computing, and Curating (Routledge, 2025), reassessing Cage’s transdisciplinary practice from a Posthuman perspective. Drawing on an extended circle of creators—the moderns, including Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, and Henry David Thoreau, and contemporaries, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, and Raven Chacon—this study exposes indeterminacy and inhuman intelligence in curation and museology. She contributed Cage-related essays to e-flux Journal (May 2025) and the edited collections including Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s (University of California, 2019), and Artist as Curator (Mousse, 2017); as well as the catalogue of the exhibition Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (The Whitney Museum of American Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021). She is currently working on a new book, Fisheye Birdview: Contemporary Art as Environmental Interface. She also continues her engagement with Lithuanian modern and contemporary art, including a forthcoming article, “Unmodern Modalities of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis,” first presented at the Yale Macmillan Center in 2025.
Along with her scholarship and teaching, Dr. Skurvida has been curating independently and writing art criticism since the 1990s. This practice emerged from the Lithuanian Independence movement and continued in the wake of other liberation movements. Since 2010, she has curated numerous screenings worldwide of Iranian video art, published articles about it, and organized and participated in related cultural production, most recently, Plurals: Feminist Voices at Worpswede Museums, Germany, in 2025.
Selected Publications
Research monograph
John Cage Composing, Computing, and Curating (Routledge, 2025)
Essays
"Labor and Anarchy in John Cage's First and Last Compositions," e-flux Journal #154 (May 2025), ed. Daniel Muzyczuk.
"Barbad Golshiri’s Acts of Alterity," ArtMargins, 12:1 (MIT, 2023).
"I as a Readymade," Your Time is My Time, eds. Annika Toots & Merilin Talumaa (Milan: Mousse, 2023), 30-39.
"Confessions from Under a Mask: How to Get Plastered and Keep Your Face for Years to Come," Echo gone wrong, March 29, 2023.
"Exhibition as Composition: Repetition and Difference," Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021), 300–304.
"Technologies of Indeterminacy: John Cage Invents," in David Cateforis, Steven Duval, & Shepherd Steiner, eds., Hybrid Practices: Arts in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s (University of California Press, 2019), 165–186.
"John Cage, Rolywholyover A Circus, 1993," in Elena Filipovic, ed., The Artist as Curator (Milan: Mousse, 2017), 229–245.
Talks
Plurals: Feminist Voices at Worpswede Museums, Germany, December 6, 2025
“Unmodern Modalities of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis,” symposium Escaping with Čiurlionis, Yale University, Macmillan Center, October 30, 2025
“Mediator mediated: on John Cage’s Film Composition One11,” in session Beyond Specificity: Experimental Intermedia Expanded (chair Tim Ridlen), Annual Conference of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS), Chicago, April 3-6, 2025
“The Discursive Anarchy of John Cage’s Writings through the Essay: ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’,” in session Anarchist Currents in Contemporary Art (chair Allan Antliff), Annual Conference of the College Art Association (CAA), New York, February 15, 2025
Courses Authored
HA 202 Feminist Art Histories, Theories, and Practices
Feminist movements gave rise to a gender-based analysis of art and its histories.
Gender, understood as a system of power, underlies feminist art histories, theories,
and practices addressed in this course, focused on the time from the 1960s to the
present. G7: Humanities, SUNY GE: Humanities, Liberal Arts Elective. Minors: History
of Art, Women & Gender Studies. No prerequisites.
HA 321 Eco-visions in Art and Design
This course surveys modern and contemporary art and design from an ecological perspective,
highlighting consciousness-raising activism and environmental sustainability. G7:
Humanities, SUNY GE: Humanities, Liberal Arts Elective, Minors: History of Art, Ethics
& Sustainability. Prerequisites: Any HA course or approval of the chairperson
HA 310 Global Contemporaries in the World of Art
Focusing on global contemporary art since 1989 and using postcolonial art theory,
students address diverse art practices grounded in their historical, regional, cultural,
economic, religious, and political contexts. G7: Humanities, G9: Other World Civilizations,
SUNY GE: Humanities, Liberal Arts Elective. Minor: History of Art. Prerequisites:
any 2 HA courses
AM 523 Art in a Global Context: Post-1989
This graduate course addresses the theoretical and sociopolitical parameters of art
production, presentation, and exchange after 1989 in a global context. This investigation,
steeped in specificity, and aimed at decentering the canon of art history, is further
expanded in student presentations, term papers, and projects. School of Graduate Studies
Division, MA: Art Market Department
Courses
- HA 112 History of European Art and Civilization: Renaissance to the Modern Era
- HA 202 Feminist Art Histories, Theories, and Practices
- HA 214 Art in New York
- HA 231 Modern Art
- HA 310 Global Contemporaries in the World of Art
- HA 321 Eco-visions in Art and Design
- HA 331 Contemporary Art and Culture: 1945 to the Present
- HA 411 Western Theories of Art
- AM 523 Art in a Global Context: Post-1989