Dr. Jordan Amirkhani

Dr. Jordan Amirkhani is Curator and Head of Research and Project Development at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought—a non-profit organization based in New Orleans, Louisiana committed to research and publishing, exhibitions and convenings on art of the global diaspora. Prior to taking on these roles, Amirkhani was a Professorial Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at American University in Washington, DC.

Recent curatorial projects include Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul, co-curated with Andrea Andersson and Essence Harden for Art + Practice in Los Angeles; Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye, co-curated with Andrea Andersson and Taylor Renee Aldridge for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; Yto Barrada: Ways to Baffle the Wind, co-curated with Andrea Andersson for MASS MoCA; and the 2021 Atlanta Biennial: Of Care and Destruction for the Atlanta Contemporary. She is currently at work on a posthumous retrospective of the visual and performance artist Tina Girouard set to open at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans in Spring 2024.

Amirkhani has written scholarship and essays on the work of contemporary artists such as Helen Cammock, Wendy Red Star, Sheida Soleimani, Soheila Sokhanvari, Vesna Pavlović, and the British collective Art + Practice. Her work has been featured in many national and international publications, including: The Paris Review Daily, Artforum, Art in America, Baltimore Arts, Boston Art Review, X-Tra, and Burnaway. Her emphasis on contextualizing contemporary art and artists working in the American South garnered her a prestigious Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation “Short-Form” Writing Grant in 2017 and three nominations for The Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism in 2017, 2018, and 2019.