Lori Cole has taught at New York University since 2014. She is a scholar of the transatlantic avant-garde who works at the intersection of literature and art history. Her book Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (Penn State University Press, 2018) examines how the genre of the questionnaire structured debates over art and national identity, yielding a self-reflexive history of modernism written by artists and critics from across Europe and the Americas. She has written on the intersection of art and print culture for exhibition catalogues published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kunstmuseum Basel. Her writing has also been published in Artforum, Cabinet, The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, The Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. She is currently working on a book about the multiple ways the modernist magazine functions as a site of exhibition.
Lori was previously the Charlotte Zysman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and a Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University and she has also taught at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Lori was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as a Junior Fellow at the Frick, where she researched the history of collecting photography. Lori has presented her research at numerous museums, including the Tate Modern, the Whitney, the Menil Collection, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Reina Sofía, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was part of the curatorial advisory committee for the exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders.” At NYU Lori teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses on modern and contemporary art and literature.