About
Aleksandra Maria KamiĆska is a scholar, co-founding editor of a zine/artists' magazine, publisher, curator, and activist based in Warsaw. Her research, curatorial, and artistic practices explore queer time, community-building, public feelings, girl as an identity category, life narratives, and queer modes of production. Her work can be found, among others, in The Anarchist Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Krytyka Polityczna. She plays bass and drums in a post-punk band NANA.
As a co-founder of a queer-feminist initiative Girls and Queers to the Front, active in Warsaw since 2015, she curated over fifty events and two exhibitions, co-edited and published fifteen literary/art zines, started the first queer independent press in Poland, and organized and conducted numerous activist and zine workshops, in order to build a queer-feminist community in which women, and queer people can feel supported and inspired. Her zines and workshops were part of shows and art/book fairs, including the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Printer Matter's NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, NY Queer Zine Fair, Athens Art Book Fair, Galeria ArsenaĆ (BiaĆystok), Warsaw Independent Book Fair, Fundacja NoĆna, Kraków, BWA WrocĆaw. KamiĆska consistently commits to practices that combine art with queer activism, as Poland is still one of the most homophobic countries in the EU.â
Photo: Katarzyna Szenajch
Aleksandra KamiĆska is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies (University of Warsaw) and works as a researcher, both inside and outside of academia. In 2018/2019, she was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University, and in 2023, she defended her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Warsaw. In her doctoral work, she examined the figure of a girl in American culture after the 2008 economic crisis, using frameworks of failure and disrupted temporality/queer time, arguing that the new image of girlhood stands in opposition to the over-present girl power discourse and visions of adulthood that modern Western society invests in. She is a member of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw.
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Growing from interdisciplinary experience, by connecting her academic background with self-taught editorial, artistic, and activist practices, KamiĆska looks for new ways of uplifting gender and sexual minorities while re-imagining dominant modes of production and prevailing narratives of power.