Midori Yamamura

Dr. Midori Yamamura is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the City University of New York at Kingsborough Community College. She received her doctoral degree in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Dr. Yamamura specializes in feminism, post-WWII art, and global contemporary art with a focus on Asia. Her secondary field is non-Western art. Between 2004-2020, she was a lecturer at MoMA. Yamamura currently serves as a field editor of the College Art Association’s online publication, CAAReview. She is a co-founder of two faculty-led research initiatives, UnHomeless NYC and IGNITERs. She has published numerous articles on post-WWII art using an object-based social feminist approach and ecocriticism. A specialist on Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama, her first book, Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular was published from MIT Press. She served as an advisor for a film, Kusama: Infinity (2018). In 2021, she co-edited an anthology, Visual Representation and the Cold War: Art and Postcolonial Struggles in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge). The book explores artistic responses to colonialism and the neoliberal economic impact on people and the environment in East and Southeast Asian countries. She is currently working on a new book on Japanese contemporary art.

Before arriving at CUNY Kingsborough, Yamamura was a full-time lecturer at Fordham University. She started teaching at KBCC in 2017. Yamamura also taught art history at The Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and Hunter College. She also offers a seminar on art and regional development at Okayama University, Japan.

Education

• MA, Queens College, CUNY, 2001
• M.Phil., The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2013
• Ph.D., The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2013