Legacy Russell
Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen (USA)
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution The Kitchen. Formerly, she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally.
Recent exhibitions include Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art at The Kitchen, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center and MOCAD (2024-2025); Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE at The Kitchen (2024); Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station at The Kitchen (2023). She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022-2023 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, a 2024-2025 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow, and a 2025-2026 Obama Leader awardee. Her first book is the critically acclaimed Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020). Her second book BLACK MEME (Verso Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award. Russell's first chapbook of poems is GAY POMPEII (GenderFail, 2025).