Jane M. Blocker is a Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory and the Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she is affiliated with the Moving Image Studies at the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. In a note on the back cover of Blocker's What the Body Cost Lucy R. Lippard writes of her: "Jane Blocker is as good a writer, scholar, and original thinker as feminists could hope for."[1]
Blocker received her Master of Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied with Carol Mavor. Blocker's research has focused primarily on performance art as it developed concurrently with postmodern, feminist, and constructionist theories.[2] Blocker teaches courses on contemporary art, alternative media: Video, Performance, and Digital Art, historiography of Art History, and gender and sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Art.