Bovino, Emily Verla

Assistant Professor

Performing and Fine Arts

Phone: 718-262-2587
Office Location: AC-1A12D
Email: ebovino@york.cuny.edu

Personal Website

Emily Verla Bovino, PhD, is the coordinator of the Art History program at York College. An art historian, artist and art writer, she works with cross-disciplinary inquiry and transmedia storytelling in research focused 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 presently working on two monographs, one on the history of York College's historically significant public art in South Jamaica, Queens (1971-1990) and the other on the concept 'plastic' in art in its various migrations and translations. She frequently collaborates with the Southeast Queens Artist Alliance (SEQAA), Queens Memory (the oral history project of the Queens Central Library and Queens College) and the CUNY University Archivist's Team. She curates York's residency program for the CUNY Dance Initiative and is the informal Chair of the Fine Arts Proposal Committee for the York College Arts Gallery. In collaboration with members of SEQAA, she has been 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; the second was held in 2025-2026 with support from the York College Foundation, Inc. Dr. Bovino was a 2025-2026 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow with the on-going project Jamaica Forum for Public Art Otherwise and 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. In 2026, she co-curated the Southeast Queens Film Festival at York College with the Southeast Queens Center for History and Culture as part of the Jamaica Forum. In 2024, she held fellowships with the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) and the CUNY Building Bridges of Knowledge (BBK) project.

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, Southeast Queens)
• public art

Publications in Field Of Expertise

Other