Tatiana Mellema
Education:
BA, Art History and Political Science (Honours)
MA, Art History
PhD, Art History and Theory
Bio
Tatiana Mellema holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia. Tatiana is an art historian of twentieth century art, Marxist feminism and critical theory. She also works as Curator of Outdoor Art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and has worked at art institutions across Canada, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Banff Centre.
Research Interests
Tatiana’s research work focuses on the critique of institutions, gender, sexuality and labour in art history post-1960s. She is developing a book on how artists of the 1970s centered socially reproductive labour in the museum-gallery nexus. Serving as a corrective to historical discourses of institutional critique, this project looks to artworks that have relied on embodiment as critique, challenging gender and race as an abstraction that is made operative in the question of value for capital.
Her current projects include articles that look to the practices of Senga Nengudi and Mary Kelly and their engagement with socially reproductive labour. She will also be presenting on social reproduction and queer socialities at the conference The Grand Transition in May 2025 organized by the Historical Materialism Network.
Through her curatorial work she seeks to collaborate with artists whose practices address the extraction of value from land and labour. Recent projects at the Belkin have included the panel Monuments (2025) and the podcast Spill Radio (2019).
