Jay Buchanan

Jay Buchanan studies modern and contemporary art, with particular attention to body politics, sexuality, infrastructure, and the afterlives of empire. His writing appears in ASAP/J, Chiricú, Theatre History Studies, and Miranda. Jay holds the Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellowship in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His primary advisor in AHA is Dr. Ila Sheren; his major area is global contemporary art, and his minor area is nineteenth-century European art. Jay completed the A.M. in Theater and Performance Studies at Washington University in 2021 and the B.A. (Theater, Politics) at Wake Forest University in 2017. He served as Graduate Student Representative to the Board of Trustees at WashU (2020-2021) and currently serves on the advisory bodies for the WashU Leads initiative and Student Sunrise (systems integration/Workday implementation). Jay is a member of the Council of Readers for the College Art Association (CAA) and co-chairs the Association's Queer and Trans Caucus for Art (QTCA).

Jay is an arts orchestrator and curator. For 2023-2024 he serves as Art Exhibition Project Manager for Moving Stories, conducting curatorial efforts on behalf of a transdisciplinary faculty collective; the resulting exhibition hosted by The Luminary in 2024, is one of several public programs through which Moving Stories engages artists, scholars, and. St. Louisans in storytelling around migration. For Fall 2024, Jay is also undertaking an independent study on museum operations with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, shadowing leaders across the organization and synthesizing insights from these experiences with Executive Director Cara Starke and AHA's Ila Sheren. Jay co-curated Ambivalent Pleasures: Advertiser Content in American Art for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (Spr. 2023) and independently organized The Grid in Millennial Vision: Selections from the Anderson Collection, 2001- for Wake Forest Art Galleries and Collections (2022). He managed START Gallery at Wake Forest from 2017-2019, helping to establish its second gallery space at Wake Downtown, the university’s satellite campus. Jay was the founding Digital Director for the Lynn Book Projects Archive and Managing Director of the sonic collective Idiosynchrony. Jay has worked with the Division of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, development/administration for The Luminary, the Education team at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Visitor and Member Services at Saint Louis Art Museum, grant evaluation with the Regional Arts Commission, and the program group at Mousetrap Theatre Projects (the principal access nonprofit for the London West End).