I’m a writer, visual studies scholar, and recovering art worker. My debut novel, Thieves, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and was published by Fence Books in 2023. You can read reviews of Thieves on e-flux and Compulsive Reader, listen to me talk about the book on the New Books Network podcast, and check out this interview in Fence magazine.

 

I use fiction and multimedia performance to navigate questions of consent, complicity, and institutional transparency. My work has been published in BOMB, performed at Participant Inc, and exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery.

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My art criticism and essays have appeared in BOMB, Flash Art, and numerous exhibition catalogues—some under my name, some not. (I was a prolific ghostwriter for years.) You can check out open letters I co-wrote on gender-based abuses of power in the art world in the New York Times, the Guardian, Artnet, and Frieze.

 

I’m currently a doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard, where my research interrogates the intertwined histories of audiovisual technology and the U.S. criminal legal system: for example, in this essay on Tamara Lanier’s lawsuit against the university.

 

You can send kind messages or conspiratorial notes to me directly at valeriewerder@g.harvard.edu.