Kelly Suzanne Donahey is a Visiting Lecturer at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Visual Studies (2024, 2020), as well as an M.F.A. in Art (2017) from UC Irvine, and a B.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute (2008). A scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American art and visual culture, her research examines the political economy of art through a materialist lens, with particular focus on the reimagination of labor ideologies within aesthetic and cultural practices, as well as their material, empirical, and sociopolitical dimensions. Her work integrates comparative-historical approaches, critical theory, and empirical research from both the physical and social sciences, engaging with disciplines including Art History, Labor Studies, American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.

Her dissertation, Negative Freedom: The Late American Avant-Garde and its Labor Aesthetics, 1965–1993, examines American identity through the concept of the work ethic, critically repositioning American avant-garde art as a site of political and material engagement with labor under deindustrialization. Challenging dominant narratives of dematerialization and postmodernity, her work explores how labor ideologies were embedded in the form, content, and production practices of avant-garde artists, particularly those involved in key social movements such as the Feminist Occupational Safety, Black Freedom, Environmental, and Consumer Rights Movements. Her ongoing research expands on these themes by examining the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as a contested space where labor ideology intersected with the Culture Wars. She also investigates the broader implications of the NEA’s defunding and the privatization of culture, focusing on how these shifts deskilled artists and reshaped the global landscape of radical art, particularly in relation to issues of social identity.

Most recently, she co-chaired the panel Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community at the Margins of the Global Village, which is currently being developed as a book proposal.

Her scholarship has been presented at prestigious forums including the College Art Association Annual Conference; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; and the Getty Research Institute. She has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Humanities Scholarship, the UCI School of Humanities, and the UCI Center for Jewish Studies. She co-organized the Alt-Right Media Literacy Speaker Series and Symposium, a public humanities initiative funded by the UCI Humanities Center and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Additionally, she served as a primary organizer and editor of the proceedings for the inaugural Body of Knowledge conference, an interdisciplinary event at the intersection of art, science, and embodied experience, supported by a National Science Foundation grant.

In addition to her teaching and research, she is the co-founder of Matte Plastic R + D and its publication arm, Bad Objects. She also serves as Assistant Editor of Critical Theory, an international journal based at Shanghai University, and as Guest Editor for the forthcoming special issue “Media Literacy of the American Alt-Right” for Media Fields Journal.