Emily Verla Bovino, PhD, is an art historian, artist and art writer who works with curation as it relates to political economies and philosophies of care. She is presently Assistant Professor in Performing and Fine Arts at York College of The City University of New York (CUNY) in Jamaica, Queens where she is Coordinator of Art History program. Her research focuses on public art as social practice; artistic research in art history; the lecture as a format in contemporary art; and intersections between contemporary art, architecture and urbanism. She is currently working on projects focused on art and environmental justice, including stewardship of York College’s public art (1978 – 1994), critical experiments with AI image generation, and intersecting issues of aircraft noise and air quality in Southeast Queens.

Born in Queens, she spent formative years in Hong Kong (1984 to 1991) and Italy (2001 to 2010). She received her BA in Urban Studies and Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University and studied Studio Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. She was part of the Corso Superiore di Arti Visive at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti under Visiting Artist Walid Raad in 2009 and received her MA and PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Concentration in Practice at the University of California, San Diego.

She returned to Hong Kong in 2018 as Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Hong Kong where she started the curatorial initiative Art Now! for the former North Kowloon Magistracy. From 2022 to 2023, she was a Research Grants Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the City University of Hong Kong. In 2021, she was awarded a M+/Design Trust Research Fellowship in Design and Architecture at the M+ Museum of Visual Culture for a project on miniature, including micro-scale models of Hong Kong street scenes, collectible model buses and soft-vinyl designer toys. At CUNY, she has held fellowships with the Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative, the Building Bridges of Knowledge Project in Ethical and Responsible Use of AI, and the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program.

Her scholarship has been published by Museum Anthropology and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She previously made regular contributions to the Italian journal Engramma of the Università IUAV di Venezia (2015-2025). Additionally, her writing has appeared in Ocula, Mousse, Spike Art Quarterly, Architectural Review, Pin Up, Frieze, Art Papers, Art Margins Online and Artforum.com. For the CUNY Building Bridges of Knowledge Project, she created a CUNY Manifold publication titled ‘What’s the Art in Artificial Intelligence?” on critical experiments with generative AI by Black and Indigenous artists.

As an artist, she has been hosted for artist residencies at SOMA (Mexico City), Fieldwork: Marfa (Texas) and FUTURA (Czech Republic) and has collaborated with soundpocket (Hong Kong), Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory (Utrecht), Altar Projects (San Francisco), and the Gulf Labor Coalition (New York). Her work has been presented at the Washington Project for the Arts (Washington DC), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), & Now Festival of New Writing (San Diego), Robert Walser Zentrum (Bern), Kunstraum Oktagon (Bern), Viafarini (Milan), ETC galerie (Czech Republic) and ApexArt (New York), among others. She was awarded a 2024-2025 American Council for Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant for the project Sounding Data Justice: Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens.

fb: emily verla bovino
insta: @nimble_love_ivory
portfolio: reveal my oblivion
texts: academia.edu/emilyverlabovino

for resume/cv contact evbovino@gmail.com