Ivana Dizdar

PhD Candidate
Ivana.dizdar@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • North American
  • Modern/Contemporary
  • Indigenous
  • European
  • Eco-Art

Areas of Interest

  • Visual and material culture from the nineteenth century to the present
  • European, American, and global Indigenous art
  • Animal studies, environmental humanities, and Arctic humanities
  • Museums, collecting, and curatorial practice
  • Issues in historiography and methodology

Biography

Ivana Dizdar’s interests span visual and material culture, the history of science, environmental history, animal studies, and the Arctic humanities. Her dissertation examines representations of the Arctic across a range of French nineteenth-century visual media, including paintings, panoramas, photographs, ethnographic sculptures, and elements of interior design. She did much of her research while a Visiting Student Research Collaborator in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a Visiting Researcher at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. In 2024-25, she is a residential fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Also active as a curator, she has worked on major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art such as General Idea (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2022), The Milk of Dreams (the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022), Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art (Museum of Arts and Design, New York, 2022), Jeff Koons: Lost in America (Qatar Museums, Doha, 2021-22), and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018-19). Most recently, she curated the first major museum retrospective of work by performance art trio the Clichettes (McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, 2024) and was the editor of a full-length catalogue on the artists (McMaster University Press, 2024).

Honours, Awards, and Grants

  • 2025 Terra Foundation Travel Grant, Terra Foundation for American Art
  • 2024-25 Getty Residential Grant (Predoctoral), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
  • 2021-24 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
  • 2023 Grant for Research at Oxford University, Oxford-Penn-Toronto Environmental Humanities International Doctoral Cluster
  • 2023 Grant for Research in France, International Doctoral Cluster for Research in France, University of Toronto, Sorbonne Université, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études

Professional Affiliations

  • American Studies Association
  • Association of Art Museum Curators
  • Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
  • College Art Association
  • Decorative Arts Trust

Education

MA, Columbia University
MA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
BA, Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Presentations

"Running in Alaska: The Visual Culture of Reindeer Fairs,” State Fairs and American Art, College Art Association, New York
"L’Arctique à la Parisienne: Visual Cultures of the Polar North in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” The Arctic throughout History: Visual and Cultural Conceptions, New York Public Library, 2024
"Postmortem Biography of a Snowy Owl" (co-presented with Rachael DeLue), College Art Association, Chicago, 2024
"Polar Bears After Delacroix: French Romanticism and the Arctic as Hell,” Corporeal Conversations / Conversations Corporelles, Brown University, 2023
"Les Zones Terrestres: Picturing Hydroimperialism in French Scenic Wallpaper, ca. 1855," (Re)thinking Landscape: Ways of Knowing / Ways of Being, Yale University, 2022

Administrative Service

Co-Chair (with Maura Coughlin, Northeastern University), “Animal Extractions,” College Art Association, 2024
Co-Chair (with Magdalena Grüner, University of Hamburg), “Other Oceans, Oceans’ Others: Human-Animal Encounters Underwater,” Modernist Studies Association, 2023
Co-Convener, Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Working Group, Jackman Humanities Institute, 2021-2023
Co-Chair (with Julie Nagam, University of Winnipeg), “Charting Constellations of Oceans, Rivers, and Islands Through Artistic Interventions,” College Art Association, 2023
Co-Chair (with Siobhan Angus, Carleton University), “Poison,” Universities Art Association of Canada, 2022

Cohort

  • 2021-2022