MFA Lecture Series: Jamal Cyrus & Stephanie Weissberg

Jamal Cyrus (born 1973, Houston) earned his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He has won several awards, most recently the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art (2020). He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2020); Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum (2018); Direct Message: Art, Language and Power, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 – Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016). Cyrus was also a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates. As a member of the collective, he exhibited at the High Museum of Art (2008); the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (2008); the Menil Collection (2007); and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Cyrus lives and works in Houston.

Stephanie Weissberg is associate curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, a position she has held since 2016. In her tenure at the Pulitzer she has curated a range of exhibitions including Rough Cut: Independent Japanese Animation (2017); Lola Alvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico (2018); Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt (2019), which has toured to several venues across the United States; Susan Philipsz: Seven Tears (2019); and Terry Adkins: Resounding (2020). She is currently working on an exhibition that explores global collective art practices throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Prior to her tenure at the Pulitzer she held curatorial positions at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, and Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy, among others. Weissberg’s research interests include Fluxus, contemporary performance art, and feminist theory. Her writing has been featured in a number of publications and journals and her 2018 catalogue Lola Alvarez Bravo: Picturing Mexico received recognition from the Association of University Presses. She holds an MA from New York University and a BA from University of California, Berkeley.