Katja Praznik

Associate Professor

Director of Graduate Studies

241A Center for the Arts

Phone: 716.645.0769

Email: katjapra@buffalo.edu

Research Interests: cultural labor, cultural policy, political economy of art, autonomy of art, Yugoslav socialism, socialist political economy, marxists feminism, invisible labor, social reproduction

Courses:

Bio:

Katja Praznik is the author of Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021) and The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016) published in Slovenian. She teaches courses related to the political economy of the arts, cultural policy, and research in the field of arts management. Praznik holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Ljubljana. Her work and research is dedicated to demystification of creativity as a form of labor and on historical and contemporary implementation of labor rights discourse and fair payment practices in the arts, cultural policy and arts management. She also focuses on the legacy of Yugoslav socialism, neoliberal destruction of the welfare state regimes as well as on issues of invisible labor and social reproduction. Her writing is published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Social Text, Historical MaterialismKPY Cultural Policy Yearbook; edited volumes, for example Reshape: A Workbook to Reimagine the Art World, Dirk de Witt et al. (Flanders Art Institute, 2021), Rad u umetnosti, Vahida Rajmukić et al. (ULUS, 2021), City of Women Reflecting 2019/2020 (City of Women, 2020); and international cultural magazines and journals, among them Garage Journal MediaGSG Magazing, Manek, Eszmelet, and Slobodni filozofzki.

Before moving to the United States, she worked as a freelancer in the Slovenian independent art scene. She was the editor-in-chief of journal Maska and was actively engaged in the struggles for improving working conditions of art workers at Društvo Asociacija.