Biography
Joan Giroux, Professor, teaches studio art, art activism, and professional practices in the School of Visual Arts. In interdisciplinary work intersecting and residing in intermediary disciplines such as sculpture, social practice, and performance, she investigates loss, healing, and building connections to and between people and communities. Giroux will be in London in spring 2025 with a Fulbright-British Library Eccles Institute Scholar Award where she will investigate the origins of the modern hospice movement, and representations of care, illness, and death at the British Library. She is currently co-curating an exhibition with Alice Maude-Roxby for the Museum of Contemporary Photography in fall 2025. Projects/exhibitions include Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability, RISD Museum, Providence (2022), marking moments, Leigh Block Gallery, Santa Barbara (2019); Saunter Trek Escort Parade (S.T.E.P.) with Lisa Kaftori, Flux Factory, Queens Museum (2018); The Commons Artists Project, MCA Chicago (2018); Take Care, Weinberg Newton Gallery (2017); kaleidoscope of influences with Lisa Kaftori and Whitney Huber, 2017 Terrain Biennial; Ill at Ease: Disease in Art, University of Buffalo (2017); and Anti-Workshop with Karen Finley at Art AIDS America, Alphawood Foundation (2017). Giroux received an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and studied Experimental Sculpture/Multi-Media with Prof. Shinkichi Tajiri at Berlin’s Hochschule der Künste.
Instructional Areas
Sculpture I; Installation/Site-Specific Art; Chicago: Design of Cities and Social Justice; Professional Practice in Fine Arts; Directed Graduate Projects; Senior Fine Arts BFA Exhibition; Foundation Skill: Photoshop; Foundation Skill: Stamps and Stencils
Creative Practice and Research Interests
social practice, ecological and environmental art, art and activism, illness, death and dying in the arts, arts and healthcare, art and design education, arts and civic engagement, educational theory and practice in the arts, civic collaboration
Degrees
B.F.A., Fine Arts Parsons - The New School for Design 1984
M.F.A., Sculpture / Interdisciplinary Arts Bard College-Avery Graduate School of the Arts 1991