Ace Lehner
Dr. Ace Lehner is an interdisciplinary visual culture scholar and artist specializing in critical engagement with photography, identity and representation. Lehner's areas of expertise include photography history and theory, trans and queer visual culture and theory, critical approaches to race and representation, modern and contemporary art history and visual culture, and performance.
Lehner's writing on art and visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, Cultural Politics, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, Journal on Images and Culture, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, REFRACT, Visual Studies and more. Lehner's scholarship has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including a chapter co-authored with Amelia G. Jones in Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (edited by Jane Chin Davidson and Amelia G. Jones, published by Wiley Blackwell, 2023). Lehner guest edited the first-ever issue of Art Journal dedicated to trans visual culture. Lehner's current book project, Trans Representations: Decolonizing Visual Theory in Contemporary Photography (working title), is based on their dissertation research, which won them the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in 2020.
Lehner's artistic practice primarily utilizes photography, installation, and performance to mine the complex relationship between representations and the constitution of identities. Lehner's project Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure was recently been featured in a solo exhibition at Brewer Harris Projects in Syracuse NY, at the Fleming Museum in Burlington VT, and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Lehner has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout the United States and Canada, including the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, NY; Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT; SOMArts, San Francisco, CA; The National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco CA; The GLBT Historical Society Museum, San Francisco, CA; SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic NY, La Centrale Gallery Powerhouse, Montreal Quebec, Canada; and many others.
