Ewa Grigar

Bio

Dr. Grigar was born in Poland but grew up in the United States, where she shared time between Chicago and New York. She received her Ph.D. degree in sociology from the New School of Social Research in New York. Her research interests in the sociology of art led her to delve into an in-depth investigation of the role of art in the public sphere and a dissertation work titled: Art and Public Sphere: the Artist, the Artwork, the Audience, and the Practice of Alternative Venues of Art Display in Post-communist Poland, which is in the preparation stage for book publishing. Apart from earning a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology, she also holds a Master of Art History, Theory, and Criticism degree (focusing on Contemporary Art) from the Chicago School of the Art Institute. In 2001, Dr. Grigar was an American Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic working on the research project “Re-inventing Contributions of the Prague Linguistic Circle: Jan Mukařovsky.” This experience of life in Prague caused her to abandon New York for the Czech Republic in 2009, where she still lives with her husband and son to this present day.

Before moving to Prague, Dr. Grigar taught various sociology, media, and art history courses in Chicago and New York for over six years. Between 2007 and 09, she also held a Teaching Fellow post at the Parsons School of Design in N.Y., where she taught courses on Visual Culture and Surveillance in Everyday Culture. Apart from her passion for teaching, Dr. Grigar has been working on diverse research projects such as consumer research and labor law violations in New York City, and she is also on the reviewer’s board for the cultural studies journal “Załącznik Kuturoznawczy” published by the University of Kardynał Stefan Wyszyński in Warsaw.
Her current research interests include; the role of art in the public sphere of Czech society and the relationship between art and social memory.