Cassandra Troyan Publications Books Talks Projects About


Email: cassandra(at)cassandratroyan(dot)com.
Click here to download CV.

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, artist, and educator whose work explores the intersections of gendered violence, living with trauma, radical histories of resistance, and speculative futures beyond capital. Their cultural research investigates the conditions for harm caused by social and state forms of domination. Whether that be through the technological apparatuses used to surveil endangered species or sex workers, autonomous organizing for queer feminist self-defense, or the types of solidarity necessary to confront crises of reproduction and ecological destruction, their artistic, poetic, theoretical interventions are always enacted towards an abolitionist horizon of liberation.

They are the author of several books of multi-genre work, including Freedom & Prostitution (2020), A Theory in Tears (2016), KILL MANUAL (2014), HATRED OF WOMEN (2014), Throne of Blood (2013) and writing or interviews have appeared in Social Text Online, The New Inquiry, Chicago Review, Entropy Mag, Shifter Magazine, Tripwire, Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, HOMINTERN, Erotoplasty, and SPAM. Their theoretical and creative work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Swedish.

They have been invited to present, perform, read or screen their interdisciplinary work internationally at venues such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA); The University of Toronto's "Sex Salon" at the Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years at SUNY-University at Buffalo NY; Contemporary Writers Series at Mills College, Oakland, California; Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology lecture series at Cardiff University in Cardiff, Wales; Casco: Office for Art, Design & Theory in Utrecht, NL; Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University; Perdu Literary Foundation in Amsterdam, NL; The Poetry Project, NY; Chicago Poets' Theater Festival, University of Sussex Poetry Festival in Brighton, UK; Index: The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden; Digital Arts Masterclass at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; Master Lecture Series at Hong Kong Design Institute; Red May, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London, UK; along with video retrospectives at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY and at Artists' Television Access in San Francisco, CA.

Recent or forthcoming publications include an exhibition text written in collaboration with artist Reba Maybury for her exhibition "Faster Than an Erection" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy (MACRO); with Helen V. Pritchard, "The Anti Menagerie: Methods for Interrogating the Supremacy of World-Shaping Violence," in Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice from punctum books in March 2022; and later this year at Veer2, Against Capture, a collection of poetry about trauma, love, isolation, and abolitionist dreaming for the end of incarceration, captivity, domestication, and borders towards trans-species solidarity. In collaboration with Helen V. Pritchard, they work on an on-going research project across their institutions entitled, "Multispecies Methods for Solidarity Stories", existing on the platform "The Anti-Menagerie" which seeks to use interdisciplinary methods as part of a virtual lab, to allow writers, scholars, artists, designers, and theorists to build collective practices. Their most recent artistic research project in collaboration with Pritchard, "In the mouth of the polar bear: The undead feeling of the world," was commissioned by Fundacio Foto Colectania in Barcelona, Spain as part of DONE 5, and presented in September 2021.They live in Kalmar, Sweden and teach theory, practice, and creative-critical writing as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design at Linnaeus University.