Alex Zivkovic

Alex is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern art and media. At Columbia, Alex completed two interdisciplinary graduate certificates through the Center for Comparative Media and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender.

His dissertation is a history of greenhouses, aquariums, and colonial gardens built at world’s fairs in Paris (c. 1860-1940). Drawing connections between science, spectacle, state infrastructures, and art in this period, this project excavates the imperial, environmental histories that undergirded French modernism.

He recently contributed catalogue entries for Manet: A Model Family (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2024) and wrote two catalogue essays for Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (Art Institute of Chicago, 2023). He previously worked as a project research assistant for René Magritte: The Fifth Season (SFMOMA, 2018).

In the academic year 2024–25, Alex will be a Gerda Henkel dissertation fellow. His dissertation research has been supported by the Buell Center, DFK Paris, the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy, Dumbarton Oaks, and others. Alex was previously a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Scholar (2023–24), teaching the undergraduate seminar “Ecology, Art, and Empire.” He was also the recipient of the 2022 Core Preceptor Award for Excellence in Teaching Art Humanities. Alex graduated from Stanford University in 2017, receiving a B.A. with distinction in Art History (with honors) and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Selected Publications

“Leonor Fini’s Surrealist Object and Other Marvelous Precipitates of Desire” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Visualities Forum (2023)

“Expanded Vitrines: Museological Sculptures and Diasporic Identity,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 51, no. 1 (May 2023)

“Joan Jonas’s Ecological Portraits: Echo and Narcissus,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 49, no. 1 (March 2022): 63–87.