Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
She is an artist and scholar with transdisciplinary engagements informed by fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s work represents both the political potential and inequitable hardships of urban experience. She has made artwork that reflects upon eviction, cities destroyed by war and natural disasters, and urban protests against injustice. While often sculptural, her work also cites the form and history of photography, especially photography's role in constituting and deconstructing historical narratives. Modigliani’s artwork has been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. Her work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Modigliani's writing can be found in academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Burlington Contemporary Journal (forthcoming), Platform Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, Prefix Photo, Anarchist Studies, and Mapping Meaning, The Journal. Her first book, Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, was published by Manchester University Press's Rethinking Art's Histories series in 2018. Her second book Counter-Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action was published by Routledge in their Critical Studies in Urbanism and the City series in 2023.
PhD, Art History and Criticism, Stony Brook University, 2010
MFA, Sculpture, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997
BFA, Studio Art, Concordia University, 1993
Selected Awards and Residencies
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency (2023)
Artist in Residence, Siena Art Institute (2022)
Critic in Residence (2017)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
Canada Council Research Grant for Professional Independent Critics and Curators (2012)
Canada Council
Selected Work
Modigliani, L. (2025) “We are Foreigners Even to Ourselves: Nádia Duvall, Performance and Embodiment as Feminist Counter Revanchism,” in Pedro Andrade, Eduarda Vieira, Patrícia Moreira, Fernando Contreras eds., Unveiling Diverse Cultural Heritages of Otherness (New York: Springer Nature, 2025).
Modigliani, L. (2025) Reimagine/Reveal Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze, Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington DE. Sept 5 – Dec. 28
Modigliani, L. (2025) “Spiritually Overqualified: Robert Rauschenberg and The Happy Apocalypse Commission,” Burlington Contemporary Journal 12.
Modigliani, L. (2023) Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action. London: Routledge.
Modigliani, L. (2020). Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale.
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum.
Modigliani. L. (2019, Fall). Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative Labor: Photographs,
History, and Re-enactment. Mapping Meaning, the Journal 3, 86-99.
Modigliani, L. (2018). Engendering an Avant-Garde: The Unsettled Landscapes of Vancouver
Photo-Conceptualism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Modigliani, L. (2018). Washington D.C., 1939; Basle, 1957; Paris, 1958; Berkeley, 1969;
Chicago, 1969; London, 1969, Windsor, 1982… Art Gallery of Windsor. Windsor,
ON, February 17–May 13, 2018.
Modigliani, L. (2017–2018). How long can we tolerate this? An Incomplete Record from
1933–1999. Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, September 1, 2017–January 7, 2018.