Scholarship and Biography
Gannit Ankori is the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Ankori has published, lectured and taught extensively about modern and contemporary art from a global perspective, with emphasis on issues pertaining to gender, nationalism, identity, religion, trauma, exile, hybridity, disability and their manifestations in the creative arts. Her geographical regions of expertise include the Middle East and Mexico.
Gannit is internationally renowned for her ground breaking scholarship on Frida Kahlo. Her books include Frida Kahlo and San Francisco (2020; co-authored with Circe Henestrosa); Frida Kahlo / Critical Lives (2013; reissued in English and Chinese in 2018, published in Turkish in 2022); Frida Kahlo: Art, Life Diary (2004); and Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (2002). Major essays include: “Frida Kahlo: The Fabric of her Art” (Tate Modern, 2005); and “Frida Kahlo: Posing, Composing, Exposing” published in conjunction with the 2018 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up.” Her books and articles have been published in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and Chinese.
In close collaboration with Indigenous Mexican fashion curator and scholar, Circe Henestrosa, Gannit has also been involved in multiple curatorial projects pertaining to Kahlo, in London, New York, San Francisco, Holland and Paris. A focused and beautiful show titled Frida Kahlo: Pose was on view at the Rose Art Museum in 2021-2022.
Another area of expertise is Israeli and Palestinian art. Ankori recently published a comprehensive essay titled "Raida Adon's Liminal Spaces of Art: Journeys, Rituals, and Intervisuality" (Israeli Museum of Jerusalem, 2020; She also edited a volume of texts by the South African-born, Israeli artist Larry Abramson, titled The Artist is a Spy (2019, in Hebrew). Her book Palestinian Art (2006) was awarded a “Polonsky Prize for Originality and Creativity in the Humanistic Disciplines”. She has also curated exhibitions on Israeli and Palestinian art, among them, Home (1997) with Jack Persekian at Gallery Anadiel, Jerusalem; Dor Guez: 100 Steps to the Mediterranean (2012) at the Rose Art Museum; Rose Video 07: Nira Pereg(2015) and Ben Hagari: Potter's Will (2016) and Displaced: Raida Adon's Strangeness (2022) also at the Rose Art Museum.
Gannit Ankori joined Brandeis in the fall of 2010. In 2013 she was appointed Chair of the Creative Arts School Council and in 2014 became the founding Head of the Division of Creative Arts, a position she filled until the summer of 2019. Before coming to Brandeis, she served as the Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University and at Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Since stepping into a leadership role at the Rose Art Museum, Ankori has curated and organized multiple exhibitions, including re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum ; "My Mechanical Sketchbook": Barkley L. Hendricks and Photography; Peter Sacks: Resistance; Arghavan Khosravi: Black Rain; Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love; Susan Lichtman: At Home at the Rose; Noe Martinez: The Body Remembers.