Tessa Laird is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts. She holds three degrees in Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
She has been a respected New Zealand art critic for over 20 years, writing for The New Zealand Listener, Art New Zealand, Art and Australia, catalogue essays and book chapters. In the 1990s she founded and edited two important New Zealand art magazines, Monica, and LOG Illustrated. She was the director of The Physics Room Gallery in Christchurch for two years before working in Los Angeles galleries for three years (1999-2003). From 2003 until 2012 she was a lecturer in Contextual Studies at the Manukau School of Visual Arts, University of Auckland. She was awarded her Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2012, which culminated in an exhibition and exegesis: Sheshnag’s Coloured Canopy: The Rainbow and The Kaleidoscope as Metaphor and Method. In 2013 her doctoral writing on colour was published as A Rainbow Reader by Clouds (Auckland) and she was included in the major survey exhibition Freedom Farmers: New Zealand Artists Growing Ideas at the Auckland Art Gallery. She spent 2013 and 2014 as a professional teaching fellow at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland before moving to Melbourne to take up a post at the VCA where she expanded her expertise in colour theory to encompass a range of more-than-human subjectivities, drawing on ecofeminist philosophy and animal studies. In 2018 her book Bat was published by Reaktion, London, as part of their celebrated Animal series.
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Scholarly Works
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Credentials
Positions
Lecturer In Art (Critical And Theoretical Studies)
Victorian College Of The Arts
Education
Doctorate of Fine Arts
University of Auckland
Masters of Fine Arts
University of Auckland