Nell Andrew

Nell Andrew (PhD, University of Chicago) teaches courses in European and Latin American Modern Art, modernism and the historical avant-garde, dance history, and early film. She is also a co-director of the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop and faculty research cluster sponsored by the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Professor Andrew is the author of the book, Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema (Oxford UP, 2020), which recovers performances, methods, and aesthetic influences for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period in Europe—including Loïe Fuller, Valentine de Saint-Point, Sophie Taeuber, Akarova, and Germaine Dulac—to demonstrate the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction. The multi-disciplinary nature of Professor Andrew’s research has led her to probe disciplinary assumptions and traditions that separate the study of the arts and humanities. Her work aims to expand the objects and methods of art history by focusing on the nature and actions of both material and ephemeral art objects; the sensory systems involved in perception and reception; the concept of abstraction; and the gendered bias of art historical formalism and modernist medium-specificity. Her most current research addresses the avant-garde’s playful and political mobilization of puppets, marionettes, dolls and masks in interwar Europe. Her scholarship appears in Art Journal, Italian Modern Art, and in numerous anthologies on the topic of modernism, including The Modernist World, eds. Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren (Routledge, 2015), Oxford Art Online, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Dance Modernism. She has previously worked for the curatorial departments of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has contributed essays and criticism for exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and contemporary art galleries in Cincinnati and New York. Professor Andrew ‘s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. At the University of Georgia she holds both the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award and the General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship.   

European Modernism and the Avant-Garde, Abstraction, Modern Dance, Early Cinema