MOAD MDC Presents New York-Based Scholar Dr. Ann Pellegrini In Excess & Enchantment: Arts Of Resistance

Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (MOAD MDC) will present Excess & Enchantment: Arts of Resistance, a lecture by the prominent New York-based scholar Dr. Ann Pellegrini at 7:30 p.m., Friday, March 9, at the MDC Live Arts Lab. A leading expert in the field of performance studies, Pellegrini's work traverses disciplines, but a constant theme is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated, and what potential risks and possibilities result. Another is the value of art and the aesthetic for repairing democratic social life.

Excess & Enchantment is part of MOAD's Living Together, an exciting cross-disciplinary series of programs that will galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Spread across the city at a wide array of venues, the series features performances, exhibitions, film and video screenings, readings, talks, and workshops that will reflect the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now. Living Together seeks to find new ways to think about civic space and citizenship, to instigate actions and conversations that may help us to reimagine our cities and our lives.

Pellegrini's areas of research encompass religion, sexuality, and U.S. public life; psychoanalysis and culture; trauma studies; queer theory; gender and performance; affect studies; performance and law; critical theories of secularism; religion and biopolitics; critical animal studies; and Jewish cultural studies. Her intersectional work on art and aesthetics resides on the cutting edge of academic scholarship.

She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of "You Can Tell Just By Looking" and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press,2013). "You Can Tell Just by Looking" was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction. She has also published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press,2003); and Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen (Duke University Press, 2008). Pellegrini co-edits the Sexual Cultures Series at New York University Press with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o. She is currently completing a new book on "queer structures of religious feeling." She is a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

MOAD celebrates its grand opening on April 5, 2018, by presenting Living Together at various sites across the greater Miami area through September 2018. Living Together will include works by 17 of the most acclaimed national and International Artists, art collectives, musicians, and writers. Events in the series will be produced by MOAD in collaboration with a range of other Miami institutions, and most events will be free and open to the public. The curators of Living Together are Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator of MOAD, and Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator based in New York.

Living Together is made possible by the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council; the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.