Anne Elizabeth Moore

Art Center’s 2014 Toyota Lecture Series kicks off on Tuesday, September 30, with a talk by Anne Elizabeth Moore entitled: Our Fashion Year: Labor, Gender and culture with The Ladydrawers Comics Collective. The event will begin at 6pm in The Wind Tunnel Graduate Center for Critical Practice at 950 South Raymond Avenue. For anyone even contemplating missing this enlightening and entertaining evening, the following self-penned primer on Moore’s life and work should provide more than enough incentive to make room for, um, Moore in tomorrow night’s calendar.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an internationally renowned cultural critic, Fulbright scholar, UN Press Fellow, USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and part of the team behind The Ladydrawers. She has written and edited several award-winning books: Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles, 2011) received a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for best book from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation in 2012. Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004) made Yes! Magazine‘s list of “Media That Set Us Free” and Reclaim the Media’s 2004 Media and Democracy Summer Reading List. The first Best American Comics made both Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” and Publishers Weekly’s Bestsellers List. Unmarketable (The New Press, 2007) made Reclaim the Media’s 2007 Media and Democracy Summer Reading list and was named a Best Book of the Year by Mother Jones. Her recent book, New Girl Law (Cantankerous Titles, 2013), the follow-up to Cambodian Grrrl, was called “a post-empirical proto-fourth-wave feminist memoir” by Bust. Moore herself was recently called a “general phenom” by the Chicago Reader and “one of the sharpest thinkers and cultural critics bouncing around the globe today” by Razorcake.

Moore has done media and gender justice work on three continents. Her journalism focuses on the international garment trade and anti-sex-trafficking NGOs. She exhibits her work frequently as conceptual art; and has been the subject of two documentary films. She has lectured around the world on independent media, globalization, and women’s labor issues. Co-editor and publisher of the now-defunct Punk Planet, and founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore was recently the theorist-in-residence at das weisse haus in Vienna, Austria, and teaches in the Visual Critical Studies and Art History departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She has also written for The Baffler, Salon, N+1, Al Jazeera, Good, Snap Judgment, the Progressive, The Onion, Feministing, Snap Judgment, The Stranger, In These Times, The Boston Phoenix, and Tin House. Her work with the Ladydrawers includes a Truthout series on gender, labor, and cultural production, and included a miniseries for Bitch Media with Janelle Asselin. She has twice been noted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series. She has appeared on CNN, WNUR, WFMU, WBEZ, Voice of America, GritTV with Laura Flanders, Radio Australia, NPR’s Worldview, and others. Moore mounted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2011 and in 2012 participated in Artisterium, the Republic of Georgia’s annual art invitational. Her work appeared in the 2008 Whitney Biennale, has been exhibited in the Spinnerei in Leipzig Germany in 2010, and made up one of the first conceptual art exhibitions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2010. Her work has been featured in USA Today, Marie Claire, Phnom Penh Post, Portland Mercury, Bust, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out Chicago, Hyphen Magazine, Truthout, Make/Shift, Bookslut, Today’s Chicago Woman, New York Review of Books, Windy City Times, Print Magazine, and the New York Times, among many more. She has lectured at close to a hundred universities, libraries, alternative spaces, and conferences around the globe.

Moore’s good friend and one of her favorite writers Elizabeth Crane wrote a short story featuring a character based on her that was widely reviewed, and thus the Village Voice once called the character based on Moore a “Possibly perfect protagonist.” Washington City Paper mused she must be “A woman who has always been comfortable in her own skin,” and Hipster Book Club called her “A perfect altruistic punk-rock super-heroine.” Moore likes the story very much but remains happy that her actual life has never been reviewed by any critic.

She has two cats and is the four-time winner of the Anne Elizabeth Moore Award for Excellence in Awesomeness, an award founded in 2006 to fill the “awards” category on her CV. This award has also been granted R—. P—., Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Liza Featherstone, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Liz Mason in 2009. While she has since won other awards, few have been as ridiculous or enjoyed in such fine company.