Elizabeth Parke defended her dissertation this spring and is a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (2015-2016) at the University of Toronto. She examines the relationships between contemporary Chinese art, urban planning and visual culture using a trans-disciplinary approach applying methodologies from art history, cinema studies, urban geography and visual anthropology. Her dissertation “Infrastructures of Critique: art and visual culture in contemporary Beijing (1978-2012),” establishes urban planning’s influence on Chinese art by drawing parallels between artistic practices, representations of the capital’s infrastructure and alternative ways of seeing the city created by artists and filmmakers based in Beijing.
Trained at Carleton and Middlebury colleges, Beijing Normal and Tsinghua universities, she was a 2010 research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her writing has appeared in China Information, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Education about Asia, The Beijinger and Art Practical. She has worked at galleries and museums including Platform China (站台中国) in Beijing, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her curatorial practice includes workforce: representing labor in Chinese propaganda posters at the University of Toronto Art Center (2012).