Dana DeGiulio

Dana DeGiulio’s work in painting, drawing, video, installation, writing, and teaching pits materiality against representation and 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 the 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.

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 18 years, for the last 11 at NYU and Columbia University. Fall 2025 will be her first semester 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, projected onto the side of the Van Gogh Museum in Arles and, most recently, in a bedroom apartment gallery in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She has circulated pamphlets and instructional videos, written press releases on the work of friends, made 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.