Legacy Russell

Executive director and chief curator, The Kitchen, New York

Earlier this month, Legacy Russell became executive director and chief curator at the Kitchen, the influential interdisciplinary arts venue in New York. She was previously associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her curating and research  is concerned with new media, performance, gender and Black and queer visual culture ‘as it travels through, and is mediated by, the Internet’. She has received a number of prizes for her work, including the Thoma Foundation’s Arts Writing Award in Digital Art in 2019 and the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso Books), came out last year. It presents the idea, which she first developed as an essay in 2013 and later through a series of lectures, that a ‘glitch’ – a mistake in the system – can be seen as an opportunity rather than an error. She is working on a second book, BLACK MEME.