Vic Brooks

Vic Brooks is a curator and creative producer who develops exhibitions, films, performances, and programs. Her research centers on the production and presentation of time-based visual art and moving image, with particular focus on the technological infrastructures and architectural acoustics of the institutions that support them. She currently works with the Calder Foundation, Aspen Art Museum, and Doris Duke Foundation on new initiatives, is developing feature films with Ephraim Asili, Aria Dean, Sierra Pettengill, and Martine Syms, and is editing the book Tuning Calder’s Clouds (Athénée Press: Bogotá, 2024) on Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling at the Central University of Venezuela’s Aula Magna. She makes films with the collective 13BC.

A nominee for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards for The African Desperate by Martine Syms, she is also a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship and Teiger Foundation’s curatorial grant for Shifting Center, co-curated with Nida Ghouse in 2023, which was named as Artnet’s Taylor Dafoe’s “favorite art experience of the year” and transformed EMPAC’s performance and media infrastructure into a multi-sensory museum to consider acoustic practices in contemporary exhibition making.

Brooks was associate director for the arts and senior curator of time-based visual art at EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for over a decade, where she also served as co-acting director from fall 2022 to spring 2024. She was visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College from 2018–23, and co-chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at Williams Grad Art, 2016–22.

Brooks has produced debut feature films with Martine Syms, The African Desperate (2022), Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oriana (2022), Clarissa Tossin, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanos canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, (2022), and Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance (2020), which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cinéma du réel.

Alongside film production, she has commissioned and produced new works with artists such as Beatriz Cortez, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Tarek Atoui, Rosa Barba, Anna Craycroft, Anaïs Duplan, Ana Navas, Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Brown, Laure Prouvost, Lucy Raven, and Moved by the Motion: Wu Tsang, Tosh Basco, Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, Asma Maroof, among many others, which have toured to institutions and festivals worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

Prior to joining EMPAC in 2013, she was based in London where she curated Serpentine Cinema with Nicola Lees and the itinerant curatorial platform The Island with Andrew Bonacina, as well as projects such as Canary Wharf Screen for Art on the Underground, Stages in the Revolution for the Whitestable Biennial, Taverna Especial for the Marrakech Biennial, the architectural commission Work Number 1347 by Martin Creed for Sketch, and projects for the Calder Foundation and Clocktower Radio in New York.