Bovino, Emily Verla

Emily Verla Bovino, PhD, is the coordinator of the Art History program at York College. She is the Project Lead of 'Sounding Data Justice', a 2024-2025 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Seed Grant initiative with funding from the Mellon Foundation, and is a 2025-2026 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow. In 2024, she held fellowships with the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) and the CUNY Building Bridges of Knowledge (BBK) project. As an art historian, artist and art writer who works with cross-disciplinary inquiry and transmedia storytelling, her research focuses on artistic experimentation with the formats of the conversation and the lecture; curatorial practice and research; intersections between contemporary art, architecture, urbanism and film; and the role of concepts in art practice. She is writing a monograph on the concept 'plastic' in art in its various migrations and translations, looking back on its history across time periods and geographies from contemporary Hong Kong, where she conducted research from 2018 to 2023. At York, she is developing an art initiative around environmental justice in Queens, while conducting archival research on Queens artist Tom Lloyd's Store Front Museum (1971-1986) in South Jamaica and its impact on the curation of the York College's CUNY/DASNY percent for art program (1980-1990). She collaborates regularly with Queens Memory, the oral history project of the Queens Central Library and Queens College, and curates York's residency program for the CUNY Dance Initiative. In collaboration with members of the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance (SeQAA), she is working on transforming the Southeast Queens Biennial -- started by esteemed former Performing and Fine Arts Department Chair, Professor Margaret Rose Vendryes -- into a Triennial hosted at York's campus. The first research program for the SEQ Triennial project, Roving Reverie, was held in 2024-2025 with support from the York College Foundation Strategic Initiatives Fund.

Office Hours

Education

Areas of Expertise

• modern and contemporary art
• art criticism and theory
• concepts in art practice
• materialist and new materialist methodologies
• historiography and art
• the lecture as a format in modern and contemporary art
• curatorial research and practice
• global conceptual art
• intersections between art, architecture, urbanism and cinema
• the geopolitics of regional entities (e.g., Italian regionalism, Greater China, Southeast Asia, Central and Eastern Europe)

Publications in Field Of Expertise

Other