Jessica Lanay is an art historian, art writer, and poet. Her research focuses on the translation of aesthetics between art epistemologies, particularly across the North Atlantic and Caribbean basin. Specifically, Lanay studies the emergence of the avant-garde and its aesthetics through political, social, and cultural lenses. Also interested in contemporary art, Lanay pays special attention to performance art, relational art, and other experimental mediums. Her dissertation, Aesthetics of the Humancitizen: Black Women’s Art, the “Human”, and Labor explores how the aestheticization of the human in Western political spheres emerges from access to privileges (also known as “rights”) that are raced and gendered. Covering art by Black women from the late 19th century to the contemporary moment, Lanay traces the global expansion of those aesthetics, their material consequences, and the place of art history in that expansion. Her art writing can be found primarily in BOMB Magazine and ArtReview. She’s reviewed or interviewed artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Senga Nengudi, Tracey Rose, Nicholas Galanin, among others. In 2021, she published a series of lyric essay artist profiles in the catalog for the exhibition Fantasy America at the Warhol Museum, the essays covered artists Naama Tsabar, Kambui Olujimi, Pacifico Solano, Nona Faustine, and Chloe Wise. In 2022, she was invited by photographer Nona Faustine to contribute to her MACK Book monograph White Shoes. Lanay interviewed Faustine for the publication and wrote the essay “I Cried—Power (Power, Lord): The Afrofantastique in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes.” She also contributed the essay “One Million Lakes: The Parallel Universes of Deborah Jack’s Praxis” to the Pen & Brush catalog for Deborah Jack’s solo exhibition Deborah Jack: 20 Years.

Her debut poetry collection, inclusive of experimental and traditional poetic forms, amphibian, won the 2020 Naomi Madgett Poetry Prize. And she also received commissions for original works from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 2020, she wrote the PSO commissioned poem “What You, Indeed, Have” which was read by actress Tamara Tunie and multi-awarded writer Damon Young. In 2022, she was commissioned again to write the short film “As I Please,” that was scored by Kathryn Bostic who also scored the Toni Morrison documentary The Pieces I am. In 2026 she was commissioned by internationally renowned photographer and artist, Shikeith, to write for Project Blue Space. Lanay wrote “Blueshifting: A Sermon for Future Ancestors” which she also read at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Violet Hour film screening of experimental films from the Kongo Astronauts.

She teaches Ways of Seeing: Imaginary Cities and Worlds, concentrating on the place of art in materializing space and history through aesthetic practice.