Aaron Levy, PhD, MPhil is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of English and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA and MPhil from the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded his PhD from the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has taught courses at Penn for over twenty years, and leads the first ever educational partnership between the School of Arts and Sciences and the Barnes Foundation, which explores the museum as a space of social care through undergraduate courses and other efforts.
He is the author or editor of numerous publications, including Cities Without Citizens (2002); William Anastasi's Pataphysical Society (2005); Helene Cixous: Ex-cities (2007); Tractatus Post-Historicus (2009); On the Living History of the Venice Architecture Biennale (2010); John Cage's How to Get Started (2010); Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (2010); and Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse (2011). Additionally, his filmography includes In Conversation at Acconci Studio, New York (2007); Tooth and Nail: Film and Video by Dennis Oppenheim, 1970-1974 (2007); Werner Herzog: On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying (2007); Rewriting Perpetual Peace (2011); Utterly Precarious: Carolee Schneemann (2013); and Art, or Listen to the Silence: Soun-Gui Kim with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (2014).
Dr. Levy has lectured extensively, both nationally and internationally, on the power of the expressive arts to transform socio-cultural norms and create openings for change to occur. As a non-profit leader and curator, his work seeks to challenge seemingly intractable socio-political problems and address pervasive inequities and social suffering in Philadelphia and beyond. He is the founding Executive and Artistic Director of Public Trust, a non-profit organization that seeks to foster learning and creative collaboration about topical cultural and socio-political issues facing Philadelphia and the world. With an expansive network of university and community collaborators, Dr. Levy has developed and led hundreds of interdisciplinary programs and symposia across the humanities, art and design, social sciences, medicine, and other fields, featuring leading scholars from Philadelphia and beyond. He has also conceived and curated several large-scale exhibitions, projects and initiatives in both institutional and public settings around the world.
Dr. Levy is a member of the Selection Committee for the Artist Protection Fund, an initiative of the Institute for International Education; has twice served on the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions (FACIE); and was a United States Cultural Envoy to Pakistan in 2010. From 2015 to 2023, he was on the board of directors of AICA-USA, the International Art Critics Association.