Fellowship / Fellows

Carrie Lambert-Beatty

  • 2010–2011
  • Humanities
  • Radcliffe Alumnae Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian at Harvard University whose research focuses on art since 1960, especially performance art in a broad sense. She has written about the intersections of dance and visual art; performance documentation and reenactment; art in media culture; art and activism; and artistic interventions in daily life. A recent article, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” (October 129, Summer 2009), explored everyday epistemology and its manipulation by artists in the age of the Internet, globalization, and the Bush presidency.

Lambert-Beatty’s article is the springboard for her work at the Radcliffe Institute, where she will write a book on artists whose work both aspires to effect social change and asserts art’s autonomy—a project she hopes will shed new light on what is “real” and what is “just art” in the early 21st century.

Lambert-Beatty received her PhD from Stanford University in 2002, where she studied 19th-century American visual culture as well as modern and contemporary art. She has also been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. Her writing on performance art, postmodern dance, and minimalism has been published in exhibition catalogs and in journals such as Art Journal, Trans, and October magazine, of which she has been an editor since 2008. Her book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s was published in 2008 by MIT Press.

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