Erin Dickey

About Me

I'm an art librarian and art historian specializing in contemporary and modern art, with professional experience in archives, special collections, and arts education, administration, and development. I earned my Ph.D. in Art History at UNC-Chapel Hill in August 2024, after serving as the Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellow (’22-’24) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. My dissertation, “Bad Information: Networks, Knowledges, and Feminist Art in the 1980s,” analyzes the material histories of information art, online projects, video installations, and telecommunications experiments by Judy Malloy, Nancy Paterson, and Karen O’Rourke, contextualizing them against the politics and aesthetics of the “information age.” I have been a museum educator at the Ackland Art Museum and taught courses on contemporary art history in the Department of Art and Art History at UNC. As a dual M.S. Information Science/M.A. Art History student, I was a Fellow in UNC’s IMLS-funded “Learning from Artists’ Archives” program. I have also worked for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC, the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC, and the national oral history nonprofit Storycorps. My recent publications include an exhibition review of "Act as if you are a curator: An AI-generated exhibition" at the Nasher Museum of Art in Panorama (2024) and “Organic Archives and Silent Presences: A Case Study of the Nlele Institute’s Photographic Archives,” with Carol Magee, in Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines (2022). My interests include oral history, digital archives and preservation, media theory and history, the social web, critical disinformation studies, global feminisms, and intersections of art and technology.