Vic Brooks

Vic Brooks was at EMPAC for over a decade and served as co-acting director with Jonas Braasch from 2022–24.

Brooks frequently publishes and consults on the production, infrastructures, and exhibition of the time-based arts, and is editing the bilingual book Tuning Calder’s Clouds (Athénée Press: Bogotá, 2024) on the interdisciplinary intersections of Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1954) at the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna. In 2023 she co-curated Shifting Center with Nida Ghouse, which was named as Artnet’s Taylor Dafoe’s “favorite art experience of the year” and transformed EMPAC’s performance and media infrastructure into a multi-sensory museum to consider acoustic practices in contemporary exhibition making.

She is a nominee of the Film Independent Spirit’s John Cassavetes Award as producer of The African Desperate, and the recipient of Teiger Foundation’s curatorial grant (2023) and the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship (2021). She has produced debut feature films with Martine Syms, The African Desperate (2022), Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oriana (2022), Clarissa Tossin, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanos canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, (2022), and Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance (2020), which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cinéma du réel. She has commissioned and produced new works with artists such as Beatriz Cortez, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Tarek Atoui, Rosa Barba, Anna Craycroft, Anaïs Duplan, Ana Navas, Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Brown, Laure Prouvost, Lucy Raven, and Moved by the Motion: Wu Tsang, Tosh Basco, Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, Asma Maroof, among many others, which have toured to institutions and festivals worldwide.

Brooks was visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College from 2018–23, co-chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at Williams Grad Art from 2016–22, and has also previously taught curatorial practice at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and NYU Steinhart, as well as film production at Cooper Union School of Art. She is adjunct curator at Calder Foundation and works as a consultant for institutions such as the Aspen Art Museum and the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, and produces feature films with artists.