Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She publishes and lectures frequently, and her writing has appeared in art-agenda, artforum.com, Artlink, Discipline, Filip, The Lifted Brow, The Miami Rail, Mousse, un Magazine, un Magazine, and The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice for which she was Founding Senior Editor. McDowell has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted many solo and group exhibitions. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2018 CAA Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award.