Leena-Maija Rossi named the Institute’s New Director

Leena-Maija Rossi started as the Institute’s new executive director in the beginning of August 2011. Before moving to New York, Rossi worked as the acting professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include queer studies, post‐structural feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and visual culture. She has written widely on representations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity in media and in contemporary art. From mid‐1980s until the early 1990s, she worked as an art critic for Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily newspaper in Finland.
Rossi has published extensively, both in academic and popular forums. She is the author and editor of several books, including Taide vallassa (Art in Power, 1999) and Heterotehdas (Hetero Factory, 2003). Rossi has also worked as an independent curator and co‐curator for several art exhibitions, such as (Un)Naturally at Kiasma, Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), and M.A.P. (Media Art Photography), which took place in several venues in the Greater Helsinki Area in 1997, and Bodies, Borders, Crossings, which was on show on Governors Island in New York in the summer 2011.
Some of Leena-Maija’s own thoughts about the new position can be read here below:
“I am looking forward to starting in this new job. I know the excellent and hardworking staff already from previous experience: We just installed the exhibition Bodies, Borders, Crossings together on Governors Island, and they really made an almost impossible task possible within a very tight schedule.
Since my own background lies in the field of contemporary art, I aim to strengthen that sector at the Institute. However, as an art historian I naturally am also passionately interested in design and built environment. It is going to be interesting to learn from the practitioners in these different fields how the Institute can best enhance their possibilities for networking in North America.
I feel that the Institute will benefit from my long experience in the academic field. I will not abandon the issues of gender studies either - visual culture at large is so tightly connected with the production of gender that it would be practically impossible. Gender is also one of the threads running through the exhibition Bodies, Borders, Crossings, which I have co-curated with Artist Kari Soinio. I am very happy that the exhibition started its tour from New York - now I feel I have already done something substantial for the Institute!
I have called New York my second hometown for the past twenty years. I studied theories of gender and visual culture at New York University as a Fulbright grantee in the early 1990s, and have kept coming back ever since on a regular basis. Now I get the chance to stay a little bit longer.”