Claire Bishop is an art historian, critic, author, and Professor in the History of Art Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008.
Her book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, best known in the U.S. as ‘social practice.’ In it, Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic.