Gabrielle Moser

Biography

Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State University Press, 2019) and, with Adrienne Huard (University of Manitoba), co-edited a special double issue of Journal of Visual Culture on reparation (2022). She is currently at work on her second book, under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press, Citizen Subjects: Photography and Sovereignty in Post-War Canada, which surveys photographic collections from across Canada for evidence of Indigenous and racialized subjects picturing themselves as sovereign citizens to a global public after 1947: a moment marked by intensified decolonial and independence movements worldwide.

In addition to her work as an art historian, Moser is an active curator and art critic who has published more than 90 reviews and interviews on contemporary art in international magazines. She contributes regularly to Artforum, C magazine, esse, Prefix Photo and PUBLIC, and has published in the peer-reviewed journals the Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Third Text and photographies. Recent exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver), Oakville Galleries, and Gallery 44: Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto) have explored the work artists do with image-objects to alert viewers to what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes as potential histories (2019). She as given public talks about this research through the Walrus Talks and on CBC Radio, presented to middle school students in South Carolina, authored an Op Ed article in the Toronto Star, and organized an online video “classroom” on photography, race and citizenship.

Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art in London, UK, the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, the University of British Columbia, and the British Library, and she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. She is a founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA—a feminist working group that, since 2016, has organized regular public events that increase intergenerational knowledge transmission—and is currently Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Art Education in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Selected Publications

Teaching activities

Moser's teaching focuses on embodied approaches to looking, where students explore how their worlds are constructed through their engagements with images, learn to make strong connections to the histories of art and visual culture, and develop perspectives on the relationship between representation, social difference, and power. Having taught courses in art history, curatorial studies, archival research methods, photography history and new media studies at both OCAD and York Universities, Moser's pedagogy incorporates experiential learning opportunities, including partnerships with local museums and galleries, where students encounter art objects in person through directed writing activities in the gallery, tours of exhibitions with artists, and internships and placements with non-profit arts organizations. 

Courses taught

ARTH 663 Art History and Social Justice: Reparative Art Histories and Curating Difficult Knowledge (Fall 2025)

ARTH 450 Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Artists, Archives and Counter Histories in Canada (Winter 2026)

Supervision

At OCAD and York Universities, Moser has supervised 11 MA/MFA/MEd theses and 2 PhD dissertations to completion. She is currently supervising or co-supervising 3 doctoral students and 1 MA student.