Melissa Gronlund

Melissa Gronlund is a writer based in London. Her writings on contemporary art have appeared in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The National, The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Art Agenda, and Afterall journal, among other places. She wrote the script for Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, the film by the Barjeel Art Foundation accompanying their exhibition of the same name (2020), and has presented episodes for the BBC’s “In the Studio”. She is also the author of Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (Routledge, 2016), which explores the relationship of contemporary art to the internet and digital technologies, and the editor of Art of the Emirates II, and managing editor of Portrait of a Nation II: Beyond Narratives (both ADMAF, 2022), and editor of Reference Point: A History of Tashkeel and UAE Art (Tashkeel, 2018), which survey the artistic landscape of the UAE. She has contributed to many catalogues by institutions include Tate, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the London ICA, and the Witte de With in Rotterdam, and peer-review essays to books including Experiences of Oil (Stavanger, 2022), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain after 1989 (Yale University Press, 2019) and Women Artists: Feminism and the Moving Image (IB Tauris, 2019). From 2007–2014 she lectured on contemporary art at Oxford University, the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, and on the Moving Image MA run by Central Saint Martins and LUX. During that time she also co-edited Afterall, published by Central Saint Martins in London, and was associate editor at Afterall Books. Originally from New York City, she studied Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Film Aesthetics at Oxford University.

Contributions