Natilee Harren is a scholar and critic of modern and contemporary art and theory, with particular focus on the conceptual and material entanglements of experimental, interdisciplinary practices after 1960. Her research interests include Fluxus, intermedia, and the twentieth-century avant-gardes, intersections between visual art and music/sound/listening, experimental scores and notations, drawings and works on paper, conceptual art and performance, the conservation of ephemeral works of art and performance, theories of appropriation, and feminist art and theory related to labor, care, and aging.

Harren is author of Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (University of Chicago Press, 2020), a theoretically driven intellectual history of the Fluxus collective that has been widely cited across the fields of art history, musicology, performance studies, media studies, literature, education, and design. She is an editor and contributing author of The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 (Getty Research Institute, 2025), a major open-access volume and online repository that examines the international proliferation of experimental scores among the postwar avant-gardes. Harren’s book Karl Haendel: Knight’s Heritage, a reconsideration of the legacies of appropriation art via the practice of LA-based artist Karl Haendel, was published by LAXART (now The Brick) in 2017. Her current research projects include a book-length study of the early-career drawings of Walter De Maria and their relation to experimental performance, sculpture, and conceptual art of the sixties and a critical history of listening practices in contemporary art. Other essays and criticism have appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, Performance Research, OnCurating, Getty Research Journal, The Burlington Magazine, Critique d’art, caa.reviews, East of Borneo, F, and Artforum, to which she has contributed regularly since 2009.

Harren’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Getty Research Institute, Fulbright Program, Houston Arts Alliance, Menil Drawing Institute, and the University of California Office of the President. She is a Senior Fellow of the Mellon–Rare Book School Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and has served as president of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, an affiliate society of the College Art Association.

In addition to teaching advanced survey courses on modern and contemporary art history and critical theory, Harren leads the graduate seminar on Historiography, Theories, and Methods of Art History. She also offers seminars on special topics including Sound/Sculpture/Site; Drawing in the Expanded Field; Fluxus and the Intermedia 1960s; Diagrammatic Visualization in Art and Theory; and Problems in Contemporary Conservation. Harren is a faculty affiliate of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the Media & the Moving Image initiative, and a number of her courses have been cross-listed in WGSS and LGBT Studies. Before joining the University of Houston in 2015, Harren held positions at Occidental College and in the Art and Art History departments at UCLA.

For a CV and more information, including additional essays and criticism not listed below, please visit https://uh.academia.edu/NatileeHarren

 

SELECT PUBLICATIONS :

 

Books

The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 (Getty Research Institute; distributed by Yale University Press, 2025) (link). Editor and contributing author with Michael Gallope and John Hicks; additional contributors include Emily Ruth Capper, George E. Lewis, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Benjamin Piekut, and Nancy Perloff. 

Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (University of Chicago Press, 2020) (link). Winner of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant.

Karl Haendel: Knight’s Heritage (Los Angeles: LAXART, 2017) (link).

 

Essays

“The Time of Diagrams: A Theory of Notation,” Performance Research, vol. 27, no. 8, “On Diagrams & the Diagrammatic,” ed. Andrej Mircev (2023): 145–152 (link).

“Proposals for Intermedia Art Education: Robert Watts and the Experimental Workshop at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1968–69,” in Intermedia, ed. Ursula Frohne, vol. 6 of Terra Foundation Essays (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2023), 224–265 (link).

“The Eternal Metabolic Network: Fluxus, Food, and Ecofeminism,” in Living Matter: The Preservation of Biological Materials Used in Contemporary Art, ed. Rachel Rivenc and Kendra Roth (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2022), 55–63 (link).

“The Fluxus Virtual, Actually,” OnCurating 51,“Fluxus Perspectives,” ed. Dorothee Richter and Martin Patrick (September 2021): 25–40 (link).

“Knight’s Heritage: Karl Haendel and the Legacy of Appropriation,” Art Journal Open, published in three parts on February 29 (link), April 22 (link), and June 30, 2016 (link).

“Fluxus and the Transitional Commodity,” Art Journal (Spring 2016): 44–69 (link).

“The Provisional Work of Art: George Brecht’s Footnotes at LACMA, 1969,” Getty Research Journal 8 (2016): 177–197 (link).

“The Crux of Fluxus: Intermedia, Rear-Guard,” in Art Expanded, 1958–1978, ed. Eric Crosby with Liz Glass, vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015) (link).

“La cédille qui ne finit pas: Robert Filliou, George Brecht, and Fluxus in Villefranche,” Getty Research Journal 4 (2012): 127–143 (link).