Dr. Holly Hughes

Biography

Holly Hughes is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work explores troubled fault lines of identity through a combination of poetic imagery and political satire. Her work has earned wide attention and placed her at the center of America’s culture wars. Hughes has guided her students at the New York Feminist Art Institute through progressive pedagogy and was a member of the Heresies Collective, alongside feminist artists like Miriam Schapiro and Mary Beth Edelson. In the early 1980s, Hughes became part of the Women’s World Café, a cooperative arts space in the East Village that attracted women artists and became a hub of the avant-garde art movement. Hughes has performed at numerous venues across North America, Great Britain, and Australia, including the Walker Art Center and the Guggenheim Museum. She has published two books: Clit Notes: Sapphic Sampler and O Solo Homo: New Queer Performance, both essential in the fields of performance studies, queer studies, and feminist performance studies. Her work has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council, and Rockefeller Foundation, and she has been recognized with several awards, including the Village Voice Obie Award and Lambda Book Award. In addition to her teaching role at the University of Michigan, Hughes is co-editing a volume titled Memories of Revolution: Ten Years of the WOW Café.

Research Interests