Re'al Christian is a writer, critic, editor, and art historian based in Queens, NY. Her work examines material histories of diaspora, movement, media, and ecology to examine the politics and poetics of shared space. Her criticism, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, and ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor. She has written texts for books and catalogues including Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home (Monacelli Press/Prospect New Orleans, 2025), And ever an edge (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2024), Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument, 2023), and On the Town: A Performa Compendium, 2016–2021 (Gregory R. Miller & Co.. 2022), among others.

She is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School, where she is the founding editor of the experimental digital publishing series Post/doc (2022–) and An Incomplete* Listing of NYC Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Archives (2023–), as well as the co-editor of the anthology As for Protocols (2025) and Maria Hupfield’s Breaking Protocol (2023). She also co-edited Acts of Art in Greenwich Village (Hunter College Art Galleries/Hirmer Verlag, 2025), the Fall 2025 issue of ART PAPERS: Horror After Horror, and is the consulting editor for the forthcoming 50 YEARS of ART PAPERS (2026). Her curatorial projects include Repetition means a/void at Parent Company (2023); Steven Anthony Johnson II: Getting Blood from Stone at ISCP (2022); and The earth leaked red ochre at Miriam Gallery (2022). She worked on the exhibitions and publications The Black Index (2020–22) and Life as Activity: David Lamelas (2021) as a curatorial fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries.

Christian was a 2025 Writer-in-Residence at the Library Residency, Athens; a 2024 Fellow at the Mudhouse Residency, Crete; and a 2022 Visiting Critic at Verein K, Vienna/Graz. She holds a master’s degree in Art History from Hunter College and a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication.

Photo by Luis Corzo