Dr Tessa Laird

Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, editor of Art + Australia Online and lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. In the late 1990s she co-founded and edited two important New Zealand art magazines Monica Reviews Art and LOG Illustrated. Since then she has been a critic for various publications including the New Zealand Listener, Art New Zealand and Art and Australia. She has written countless catalogue essays and chapters in artist’s monographs. Her speculative inquiry into colour A Rainbow Readerwas published by Clouds in 2013. Her cultural history of bats was published in 2018 as part of Reaktion’s Animal series. She is interested in the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in the Anthropocene.