Tom Day

Biography

Tom is Head of Art, Architecture and History of Art at Yale University Library and Director of the Yale Film Archive. Prior to joining Yale he held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London) where he was assistant professor of History of Art and and interim Director of the Terra Foundation Centre for American Art. He has also served as Executive Director of The Filmmakers’ Cooperative a nonprofit archive of experimental film and media art in New York City.

Tom’s research and teaching is focused on political history of media art and on the art history of urbanism in the United States. He has taught widely in both History of Art and Film/Media studies departments and programs

He has curated screenings and exhibitions at venues including the Camden Art Center, Film at Lincoln Center, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center and with the Public Art Fund. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in venues including Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Panorama and British Art Studies and he has contributed chapters to number of edited collections, including his own volume Pop Cinema (co-edited with Glyn Davis, Edinburgh University Press, 2024), the first book-length examination of the relationship between Pop art, experimental film and video art.

He is currently working on a book entitled Drop Dead: Art, Urban Crisis and the End of New York which explores the multifaceted decline and neo-liberalization of New York City through the prism of artists thinking about public space, housing, sanitation and policing. In 2025 The project was awarded a Robert David Foundation Fellowship from the New York Historical Society.

Education BA (Hons) (University of Sussex), MA (University of Sussex), PhD (Edinburgh University)

Publications

Books

● Drop Dead; Art, Urban Crisis, and the End of New York (in preparation)

● Pop Cinema, co-edited with Glyn Davis (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024), 263 pp.

Book Chapters

● ‘Cycles of Censorship: David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1986-1987/2010) and the politics of queer moving-image art’, in Mark McKenna (ed.) Screening Controversy (in press Routledge, 2026).

● ‘Downtown TV: Talking Heads, The Configuration of the Human and the Utopia of Television’, in Sean Albiez and David Pattie (eds.), Talking Heads (in press, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

● ‘Broadway by Light (1957) and William Klein’s Pop between Stillness and Movement’, in Tom Day and Glyn Davis (eds.) Pop Cinema (2024), 57-77.

● ‘Towards a History of Pop Cinema’, co-authored with Glyn Davis, in Tom Day and Glyn

Davis (eds.) Pop Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 1-22.

● ‘Pop Collage and the Pop Underground: Craig Baldwin’s Wild Gunman (1978)’, Craig Baldwin: Avant To live! (Incite! Journal of Experimental Media, Incite! and The San Francisco Cinematheque, 2022), 94-112.

Journal Articles

● ‘Jeff Keen’s Pop Film: The Saturation of Media and the Politics of Images’, British Art Studies (special issue on collage in Britain since 1945) (in press Yale University Press, 2026)

● ‘Making it Function Differently: TV Sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 47, Issue 3 (December 2024), 430-449.

● “‘No Art’ Protests: Restricting and Withdrawing Artistic Labor Downtown,” in “Ex-Artists in America,” ed. Oliver O’Donnell, In the Round, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10, no. 1 (Spring 2024), 1-7.

● ‘Understanding Media’ [Review of Alex Kitnick, Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2021); Erica Levin, the Channelled Image: Art and Media Politics After Television (Chicago, 2022) and Francesco Spampinato, Art Vs. TV: A brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television (Bloomsbury, 2022)]’, Art History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (June 2023), 625-632.

● ‘Total Cinema [Review of The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 1963-1965]’, ASAP/Journal (October 2022), online.

● ‘Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger and the Pop Portrait Film’, Short Film Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2020), 153-156.

Recent Conference Organisation

● ‘Locating Downtown’, New York University and the Whitney Museum of American Art, 23-25 January 2026.

● ‘Chains of Desire: Presentations on Martin Wong’, Camden Art Center, 13 September, 2023.

● ‘Heading Uptown: Art and Activism in The Bronx’, Association for Art History, Annual Conference, University College London, 12-14 April 2023.

● ‘Approaching Downtown: Avant-Garde Cultural Production in New York City, 1970s-1990s – An Interdisciplinary Workshop’, Courtauld Institute of Art, 11-14 July ,2022. (Funded by Terra Foundation for American Art.)

● ‘The Moving Image as Subject and Practice in American Art, 1900-1990’, artist talk and lecture series, Courtauld Institute of Art, March-June 2021.

Recent Papers/Invited Talks

● ‘Watercooler Video: Andy Warhol’s Theory of Television’, part of panel ‘Currents: Video’s Aqueous Aesthetics’, College Art Association 114th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 18–21, 2026.

● ‘Relics of Urban Renewal: Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Archaeological Finds and the Bronx’, part of panel ‘Heading Uptown: Art and Activism in The Bronx’, Association for Art History, Annual Conference, University College London, 12-14 April 2023.

● Invited Speaker, Sprüth Magers Gallery, London, Talk: ‘Gretchen Bender: Abstraction, War and the Publicness of Television’, 14 March 2023.

● ‘Becoming Media: Surveillance, Violence and the Policing of Queer Bodies in the Art of Keith Haring’, Panel: ‘Eyes on The Street: Art and Policing’, Association for Art History, Annual Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, 6-8 April 2022.

● ‘Spectacle Nation: The Political Imaginary of Television and the Configuration of the Human in the Art of Keith Haring’, American Art and the Political Imagination, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, March 18–19, 2022.

● ‘False Advertising: The Reception of Television and the Creation of Art in the East Village’, part of lecture series The Moving Image as Subject and Practice in American Art, 1900-1990, Courtauld Institute of Art, March 2021.