What is Neon Queen Collective?
The Neon Queen Collective is a trio of Austin-based curators—Jessi DiTillio, Kaila Schedeen, and Phillip Townsend—who collaborate to investigate topics such as race, ethnicity, representation, class, sexuality, and gender in socially engaged art produced by feminist artists of color.
By engaging with history, education, archives, memory, and public spaces, our curatorial projects aim to engage our contemporary realities in the political structures of the past. We gravitate towards art that is emotionally affective--art that may make its viewers laugh, cry, or feel feelings without easy explanations.
Our curatorial focus includes visual art exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and discussions.
Who is Neon Queen Collective?
Jessi DiTillio, PhD
Jessi DiTillio earned her PhD at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on 20th century American Art with a focus on African American artists, contemporary art engaging the politics of race and gender and sexuality, and curatorial practice. Her dissertation, “After the Punchline: American Parody Since 1970 as Generative Form,” examines parody as a politic tactic in the work of Robert Colescott, Glenn Ligon, and Nao Bustamante. She was a 2019-2020 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art, and has held curatorial fellowships at the Visual Art Center, the Warfield Center Galleries, and The Contemporary Austin. She served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, where she curated the traveling exhibition “Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power.” She also served as Interim Director of the Association for Academic Museums and Galleries.
Phillip Townsend
Phillip Townsend is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin who focuses on Modern and Contemporary art of the Black Atlantic and specializes in theories of displacement and the politics of space and identity. He recently earned his MA in Art History at UT-Austin and received his BA in Art History from the University of South Florida. Before beginning his doctoral program, Phillip curated a photographic exhibition “Light and Life: St. Louis Cemetery No.1 Reframed through the Lens of John Pinderhughes” at the Warfield Center Gallery, IdeaLab. Phillip served as the Drs. Susan G. and Edmund W. Gordon Research Fellow in African American Art at the Blanton Museum and Curatorial Assistant at the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies. Phillip has been published in African Arts and E3W Review of Books.
Kaila Schedeen
Kaila Schedeen is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also received her undergraduate degree in 2014. She specializes in contemporary American art with a particular focus on Indigenous artists and artists of the African Diaspora who critically examine the terms of identity, belonging, and nationhood in the United States through photography, performance, and multimedia works. Her dissertation considers how the artists Tseng Kwong Chi, Carrie Mae Weems, and Will Wilson have used photography to engage—and ultimately reject—narratives of U.S. national identity and beonging as they relate to landscape representations and ideologies. Kaila has previously held positions at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art; John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; and Mechanical Hall Gallery at the University of Delaware. She is currently the 2019–2020 Curatorial Fellow at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin.