Legacy Russell

Legacy Russell is an American curator and writer. She is associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Previous to this role Russell worked as an independent curator at Artsy. She has held roles at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Creative Time, and The Brooklyn Museum. She is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. In 2019, The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation awarded Russell the Arts Writing Award in Digital Arts. In 2012, Russell coined the term Glitch Feminism which is the subject of her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto set to be published in September 2020 from Verso Books.

Early life and education

Russell was born in New York City and grew up in the East Village. She is the daughter of Harlem-born photographer and technologist Ernest Russell and Kamala Mottl, a community gerontologist. She is the great-granddaughter of Nolle Smith, black cowboy, engineer, and Hawaii statesman. She attended Friends Seminary, a Quaker school in Manhattan. Russell holds a dual-major Honors B.A. from Macalester College in Studio Art & Art History and English & Creative Writing (focus on poetry) with a minor in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Russell has an MRes in Art History & Visual Culture with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her graduate dissertation focused on the notion of “re-performing reality” and shared research on artists such as Devin Kenny, Ann Hirsch, Awol Erizku.

Curating and Academic Research

Russell’s curatorial and academic work focuses on queer histories, blackness in visual culture, Internet culture, feminism, new media, moving image, performance, and digital art practice. As a curator she has done extensive work around her originating concept of Glitch Feminism. Russell has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.