Concentration: Visual Culture, Art, and Performance Studies
O’Brien is a disabled and chronically ill multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer living in Madison. His work is both personal and pedagogical, exploring the intersections of gender, whiteness, and embodied trauma. His current research involves creating queer crip nihilism theory, examining specific art projects, and analyzing them from this perspective.
Recent and upcoming writing publications include: Homecoming: A Project of Tracing Trauma and Building Community, Best of Ten Years: An Anthology, Fwd: Museums Journal. Bridge Books Publishing, The Desire for Ugliness: Queers, Rebels, and Freaks (part of Vol. 5 Playing Shakespeare’s Characters, published by Peter Lang Press). Home: The Trans Body (FWD: Museum, published by UIC Museum Studies Department and Sister Spit, 2020), Boyle Heights and The Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence (The American Quarterly Journal, published by John Hopkins Press, 2019), The American Culture of Guns and Prisons (FAYN Magazine, 2017), and others.
O’Brien has exhibited, screened, and curated work at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Emory College, Fotografiska Museum, The Gay and Lesbian Canadian Archive, and Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in South Korea, among others.
He has also shared their experience as a creative educator with various institutions, speaking at the University of Illinois, the University of New Mexico, the University of Lebanon, Beirut, the University of Arizona in Tucson, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, the American Studies Conference in Honolulu, and the San Francisco Art Institute.