Ivana Dizdar

PhD Candidate
Ivana.dizdar@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Modern/Contemporary
  • European
  • North American
  • Indigenous
  • Architecture
  • Eco-Art

Areas of Interest

  • Nineteenth-century visual and material culture
  • European, African, and global Indigenous art
  • Animal studies and environmental humanities
  • Museums, collecting, and curatorial practice
  • Issues in historiography and methodology

Biography

Ivana Dizdar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation examines representations of the Arctic in French nineteenth-century visual and material culture. 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 University of Toronto’s Arctic Working Group. 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. This semester at the University of Toronto, she is teaching the undergraduate survey on art of the long nineteenth century.

Also active as a curator, she has worked on major exhibitions of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the 59th Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums (Doha), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa; with an exhibition subsequently hosted by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gropius Bau in Berlin). Currently, as Guest Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton), she is organizing the first-ever retrospective of the Canadian performance art trio the Clichettes.

Honours, Awards, and Grants

  • 2021-24 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
  • 2023 Grant for Research at Oxford University, Oxford-Penn-Toronto Environmental Humanities International Doctoral Cluster
  • 2023 Grant for Research in France, International Doctoral Cluster for Research in France, University of Toronto, Sorbonne Université, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études
  • 2022-23 Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
  • 2022 Leonore V. Kinghorn Scholarship, University of Toronto
  • 2022 Helen Jeannette Down Fellowship in Art History, University of Toronto
  • 2022 Doctoral Research Travel Grant, University of Toronto
  • 2021-22 Junior Fellowship, Massey College, University of Toronto
  • 2021 Department of Art History Scholarship, University of Toronto
  • 2021 Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto
  • 2021 Victoria College Emerging Leader Award, University of Toronto
  • 2019 First Place Award, Master’s SynThesis Competition, Columbia University
  • 2019 MODA Thesis Research Award, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
  • 2019 PepsiCo Research Fellowship, Harriman Institute, Columbia University
  • 2018 Research Grant, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
  • 2018 Research Grant, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University
  • 2017 Research Grant, Graduate Student Advisory Council, Columbia University
  • 2017 Gatsby Grant, Arts Initiative Council, Columbia University
  • 2017 Ruebhausen Fund Scholarship Award

Professional Affiliations

  • American Studies Association
  • Association of Art Museum Curators
  • Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art
  • College Art Association
  • Decorative Arts Trust
  • Modern Language Association
  • Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
  • Universities Art Association of Canada

Education

MA, Columbia University
MA, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
BA, Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Presentations

“L’Arctique à la Parisienne: Visual Cultures of the Polar North in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” The Arctic throughout History: Visual and Cultural Conceptions, New York Public Library, 2024
"Postmortem Biography of a Snowy Owl" (co-presented with Rachael DeLue), College Art Association, Chicago, 2024
“Polar Bears After Delacroix: French Romanticism and the Arctic as Hell,” Corporeal Conversations / Conversations Corporelles, Brown University, 2023
“Les Zones Terrestres: Picturing Hydroimperialism in French Scenic Wallpaper, ca. 1855," (Re)thinking Landscape: Ways of Knowing / Ways of Being, Yale University, 2022
“Between a Rock and a Landscape: François-Auguste Biard and the Visual Culture of Arctic Mineralogy," Collecting the North, University of Oslo, 2022
“The Arctic in Paris and Paris in the Arctic: Expressions of the North by François-Auguste Biard and Léonie d'Aunet, 1839-1854,” Modern Travel, Modern Landscapes: Connections and Exchanges in Europe, c. 1850-195, Durham University, 2022
“Embracing the North: Panoramic Visions of Global Commerce in Triumphal France, 1889,” Nineteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art, Dahesh Museum, 2022

Administrative Service

Co-Chair (with Maura Coughlin, Northeastern University), “Animal Extractions,” College Art Association, 2024
Co-Chair (with Magdalena Grüner, University of Hamburg), “Other Oceans, Oceans’ Others: Human-Animal Encounters Underwater,” Modernist Studies Association, 2023
Co-Convener (with Matthew Farish, University of Toronto and Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen), Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Working Group, Jackman Humanities Institute, 2021-2023
Co-Chair (with Julie Nagam, University of Winnipeg), “Charting Constellations of Oceans, Rivers, and Islands Through Artistic Interventions,” College Art Association, 2023
Co-Chair (with Siobhan Angus, Carleton University), “Poison,” Universities Art Association of Canada, 2022
Co-Chair (with Siobhan Angus, Yale University), “Fire and Ice: Elemental Art and Its Histories,” Universities Art Association of Canada, 2021

Cohort

  • 2021-2022