Dr. Alise Tifentale is an art and photography historian, writer, editor, curator, and educator based in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York in 2020.
Currently, Alise Tifentale is finalizing the book Photo Club Culture: Global Image Circulation, Competition, and Collaboration in the 1950s and 1960s (forthcoming).
Tifentale is the founder, director, and curator of Art Days Forever, the archive and estate of photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) and painter Juris Tifentals (1943-2001).
She also teaches various art history and history of photography courses at CUNY Kingsborough, CUNY Queensborough, Marywood University, and SUNY Old Westbury.
Alise Tifentale is the author of The Photograph as Art in Latvia, 1960-1969 (2011), Photographer Alnis Stakle (2009), and the co-author or editor of several other books about photography. Tifentale is also the author of three fiction books published in Latvian and German.
Among other exhibitions and projects, Tifentale co-curated the Pavilion of Latvia at the 55th Venice Art Biennale (2013) together with Anne Barlow and Courtenay Finn. Before that, Tifentale was the founder and editor-in-chief of the photography magazine Foto Kvartals (2005–2010) and also the founder, director, and curator of the first photography gallery in Latvia, FK Gallery (2010).
Her fields of expertise are interdisciplinary and include the sociology of culture, art history, visual culture, photography history and theory, social media studies, and transnational cultural networks. Her secondary field of expertise covers selected topics in Soviet, post-Soviet, and Eastern European art history. Since 1998 she has written extensively about contemporary art and the history of art and photography in Latvia and the Baltic region.
Tifentale’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Art History & Theory, ARTMargins, CAA.Reviews, Communication Today, Foto Kvartals, MoMA Post, Networking Knowledge, PhotoResearcher, Russian Art & Culture, Scriptus Manet, Social Sciences, Studija, and others. She has contributed chapters to volumes such as Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (2018), Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), The History of European Photography 1970–2000 (Central European House of Photography, 2016), and Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Happening right now
See the latest updates from my Instagram feed below, and feel free to follow and connect via social media.
News
So thrilled to see my article “Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011)”, published in MoMA Post in 2021, now included in an anthology of Central and Eastern European feminist writing.
The talk will be delivered via Zoom. Find the registration link and more details about the event here: https://www.photographynetwork.net/news/worldwide-photo-clubism
A panel I’m organizing and chairing has just been accepted for the CAA (College Art Association) 113th Annual Conference that will take place at the New York Hilton Midtown, New York City, February 12–15, 2025. Mark your calendar and please come participate in the conversation!
I had the honor to serve as an external reader on Paulius Petraitis’ dissertation committee. Paulius defended the doctoral dissertation “Intermediality and Networked Meaning-Making in Contemporary Baltic Art Photography” on June 18, 2024.
Featured news from 2023
Featured news from 2022
