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Dore Bowen is a visual theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary art. Writing on an international group of artists--including Yael Bartana, Dan Graham, Akram Zaatari, Bruce Nauman, Elín Hansdóttir, and Lydia Ourahmane--Bowen publishes in a variety of venues, including Art in America, Culture et Musées, Intermédialités, Afterimage, and Camerawork Journal. In 2019 she published Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters, with Constance M. Lewallen (University of California Press). Currently, she is completing a monograph examining the diorama as an instrument of colonialism and counter-modernism from 1822 to the present. 

These projects have been supported by fellowships and grants from the Camargo Foundation, Clark Art Institute, Centre Allemand d’histoire de l’art, Getty Center, and San José State University, among other institutions.

Bowen has worked as a curator in France and the United States. Exhibitions include Agitate: Negotiating the Photographic Process (SF Camerawork, 2003), which ushered in a wave of interest in cameraless photography, and Soit dit en passant (La Compagnie, Marseille, 2006) which focused on the way keywords gender photographs from the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. In 2018-19 she served as lead curator for the reinstallation of Bruce Nauman's immersive San Jose Installation (Double Wedge Corridor with Mirror), which was built into the gallery where Nauman originally installed it in 1970, thereby prompting reflections on the changing nature of experience.

As Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at San José State University, her recent courses include Issues in Contemporary Art (“The Thing”), Alternative Modernisms (“Spectacles: From the Magic Lantern to Immsersive Art"), Curatorial Practicum, MFA Seminar ("The Archive"; "Art vs, Craft"), and Art Historical Methods.

She can be contacted at dore.bowen@sjsu.edu.

CV is here.

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