Dana DeGiulio

Dana DeGiulio’s work in painting, drawing, video, installation, writing, and teaching tries to ask the means what the ends are. She conducts an iterative perceptual painting practice and is interested in genre as a site to play out a dialectic of defiance and allegiance, in repetition as devotion, habit, and estrangement, in attention as volatile, volitional, and market rate, and in looking away as a form of care. Her project in all its forms pits materiality against representation.

Dana (b. 1978 Chicago Heights, IL) studied at SAIC, worked at Blick during undergrad, tended bar in Iowa, delivered pizzas and worked customer service at a university bookstore in Wisconsin, stocked refrigerator shelves at Whole Foods for seven years after grad school, and has taught visual art to graduate and undergraduate students for 19 years, prior to RISD at NYU and Columbia University. She was resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2024, and last year delivered visiting artist talks at Yale, Rutgers, and the Schwules LGBTQ+ Museum in Berlin. Fall 2026 will begin her second year at RISD.

Dana’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, erev rav, Impulse Magazine, Mousse Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporary Art Daily, Bad at Sports, NewCity Chicago, on the Open Space Platform at SFMoMA, and in other publications. She has shown in commercial galleries and in artist-run spaces, in illegal air bnbs, on rooftops, in two high school gymnasiums and one Popeye’s Chicken restaurant, in a car, on the F train, in a shop window in Chinatown, projected onto the side of the Van Gogh Museum in Arles, in a bedroom apartment gallery in Crown Heights, and in a house where a stranger’s family lives. 

She has circulated pamphlets and instructional videos, written press releases on the work of friends, produced moving-image work expressly for smartphones and, in 2019, wrote and released a book called Nefertiti for the Blind. From 2008–14, she was co-director of Julius Caesar, an artist-run exhibition space she co-founded with her friends in Chicago. Dana recently moved with her family to Cranston, RI, and is at work on a painting manual tentatively called Severed hand / feeling of sky.