Ivana Dizdar is an art historian and curator. She specializes in nineteenth-century visual culture and its intersections with geopolitics, science, and law. She is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation examines representations of the Arctic in French nineteenth-century visual and material culture. In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University; in 2023-24, she was a visiting researcher at the Musée d'Orsay.
At the University of Toronto, she is a co-convener of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Working Group at the Jackman Humanities Institute, a member of the Oxford-Penn-Toronto International Doctoral Cluster in Environmental Humanities, and a member of the Arctic Working Group. She has given talks at the University of Lagos, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oslo, the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, the Williams College Museum of Art, Boston University, Brown University, Yale University, MIT, Princeton University, Columbia University, New York University, and the New York Public Library, among other venues. She has also published and presented research on modern and contemporary African, East European, Latin American, and global Indigenous art.
Currently, she is Guest Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art (McMaster University, Hamilton), where she is curating the first-ever retrospective of the Canadian performance art trio the Clichettes. Previously, she was Curatorial Assistant in Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada, where she worked on the retrospective General Idea (Ottawa, 2022; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2023; Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2023-24). Other major exhibitions include The Milk of Dreams (the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022), Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, 2022), Jeff Koons: Lost in America at Qatar Museums (Doha, 2021-22), and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2018-19). Previously, as Co-Director and Curator at 8eleven Gallery (Toronto), Dizdar organized solo exhibitions by Tau Lewis, Maya Ben David, Stephanie Comilang, Patrick Cruz, and other contemporary artists.
Dizdar’s own performances and videos have appeared in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including venues in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Mirroring neocolonial practice in the spheres of art, business, and politics, her eponymous performance persona runs a multi-million dollar commercial gallery franchise expanding through the so-called Global South.