While collaboration is celebrated in many contexts, the actual work of intellectual and creative collaboration is rarely discussed or modeled. The Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics fills this gap by creating a space for scholars and artists to think, work and create collaboratively, allowing students to learn what collaborative processes look like from the inside and develop invaluable skills for their own creative and scholarly practice. It convenes multidisciplinary and multi-modal configurations of artists, scholars, writers, curators, performers, and practitioners interested in exploring the radical possibilities and transformative potential of reinventing aesthetics through innovative approaches to making and thinking about art.
The Princeton Collaboratorium is a co-curricular space driven by innovative research, ideas, and imagination. Unlike earlier invocations of the term in the context of scientific inquiry, empirical or quantitative research and data do not serve as its driver. Conceived as a studio space modeled on the artist’s studio, the project is designed as a platform for incubating collaborative thinking and making that merges history, theory and creative practice.
Housed in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Princeton Collaboratorium facilitates student, faculty and community convenings, creative initiatives and interventions, and group studios that use collaboration as the primary structure of their inquiries and take original and inventive approaches to aesthetics as their guiding principle. The Princeton Collaboratorium hosts public dialogues and seminars that explore what might constitute a radical aesthetics and what such a redefinition of this concept might yield for research, teaching, and learning at Princeton and beyond.
Faculty Convener
Photo by Dorothy Hong
Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts and Director of the Princeton Atelier.
Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in Black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in Black diasporic communities and the interventions of Black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.
Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl). In 2024, she received the Photographic Studies Prize from London’s Royal Anthropological Institute. Campt has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.
Campt is the faculty convener for the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics, housed in the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Art & Archaeology.
Read Campt’s full faculty profile
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