Vivian Sky Rehberg

Vivian Sky Rehberg is a Senior Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy, attached to the KCW-Kenniscentrum WdKA. As an art writer, researcher, and educator, Vivian’s primary areas of focus have been shaped by lifelong encounters with artists and creative practitioners alongside the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary art. She obtained her MA in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University (Stony Brook, New York) and her PhD in art history from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) with the dissertation The Rhetoric of Realism: Painting, Politics, and Commitment in France, 1940-56. She moved to Paris in the mid-1990s, where she worked as a curator, writer, translator, and in art education before she relocated to Rotterdam in 2012. Prior to joining RASL in fall 2019, to contribute to the development of a transdisciplinary Master program, Vivian was Course Director of the Master Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, where she was also a writing tutor and taught courses in modern and contemporary art history and theory. Vivian has published widely on modern and contemporary art and was a contributing editor and freelance correspondent for frieze magazine for over a decade. Vivian’s current research interests include the psychology of aesthetics and aesthetic experience, aesthetic emotions and emotional labor, and how emotions are normalized, socialized, shared, inhibited, or communicated within communities of practice and among viewers-receivers-participants.