Judith Delfiner

University Paris Nanterre (France)

Against the grain: women artists and office technologies

2025–⁠2026: Fall

Judith Delfiner is Associate Professor in contemporary art history at Paris Nanterre University. She is currently on secondment to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS/CNRS). 

Her work focuses on counterculture practices (painting, literature, assemblage, music, film, installation, performance, fanzines, photography, xerography, mail art, and artist's books), a concept she examines in light of the experimental and underground art scenes in the United States after World War II, which allows her to question its historicity and relevance today. She has developed this research along different lines, including links to historical avant-garde movements, Dada in particular (Double-Barrelled Gun: Dada in the United States, 1945-1957, Les presses du reel, 2011) or the question of modes of production and circulation of alternative printing techniques (Jay DeFeo – Etudes Xérographiques, La Part de L’oeil, 2023). 

She is currently writing a book on the medium of photocopying under contract with Zone Books. Judith Delfiner was also editor-in-chief of Perspective: actualité en histoire de l'art, the journal of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), from 2017 to 2020. 

In 2024, she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. During her stay at the Italian Academy, she will conduct research on the various strategies developed by women artists, from the 1960s to the present day, for reappropriating office technologies in order to use them against the grain and turn them into vectors of creation.