Faculty

Michelle Maydanchik is a Dietrich School Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellow. She studies the history and theory of performance art, with a specialization in practices originating in Moscow after 1960. After receiving her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago in December 2014, she was appointed Mellon-Keiter Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Art at Amherst College (AYs 2014-2016). Her research and teaching interests focus on contemporary art’s relationship to globalization, mass media, politics, and the commodity form.

She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation to prepare a book manuscript, titled Creative Disruption: Contemporary Russian Performances, which centers on a spectacular strain of performance art known as Moscow Actionism. Creative Disruption argues that this group of post-Soviet artists used the medium of performance, the aesthetics of spectacle, and the practice of scandalization to address their turbulent local circumstances in the Russian Federation while simultaneously circulating and promoting their work throughout the transnational network of market and media structures that constituted the contemporary artworld during the 1990s. Thus, this project proposes a capacious understanding of performance by shedding light on the medium’s ambivalent relationship to the economies and institutions of contemporary art. She is also pursuing a second book project titled Cold War Conceptualisms and the Performative Turn. This comparative study concerns the relationship between the development of conceptual art and the rise of a mandate to “perform” in both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. This text asks: (i) what is the status of “performance” in authoritarian situations or technocratic societies, and (ii) how have contemporary artists used conceptual and event-based artworks to reflect on—and sometimes offer a corrective to—their surrounding socio-political situations?

Much like her research, Maydanchik’s teaching bridges the fields of Art History, Slavic Studies, Performance Studies, and European Studies. Previously taught courses include: “20^th-Century Performance Art and Theory;” “Art and Politics in Russia, 1860-the Present;” “Visual Art of the Cold War;” “Histories of Performance in Russia;” and “Introduction to Art.” At Pitt, she is teaching “20^th-Century Russian Art: Between East and West” and “Art Since 1945.”

Her research and teaching have been supported by a College Art Association Professional Development Award, an SSRC Dissertation Development Award, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, an IIE Graduate Fellowship for International Study, a Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship from the University of Chicago, among others.