The Brooklyn Rail

LEENA-MAIJA ROSSI started as the executive director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York in August 2011. Before moving to New York, Rossi worked as the lecturer and acting professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include queer studies, post-structural feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and visual culture. She has written widely on representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in media and in contemporary art. From mid-1980s until the early 1990s, she worked as an art critic for Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily newspaper in Finland. Rossi has published extensively, both in academic and popular forums. She is the author and editor of several books, including Taide vallassa (Art in Power, 1999) and Heterotehdas (Hetero Factory, 2003). Rossi has also worked as an independent curator and co-curator for several art exhibitions, such as (Un)Naturally at Kiasma, Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), M.A.P. (Media Art Photography), which took place in several venues in the Greater Helsinki Area in 1997, and Bodies, Borders, Crossings, which was on show on Governors Island in New York in the summer 2011, has toured in Norway and Finland, and will be part of the Photography Biennial in Lima, Peru, in April - May 2014, and in Montevideo, Uruguay, in August 2014.