Paisid Aramphongphan is a writer and teacher with a background in modern and contemporary art history as well as dance and performance studies. He holds a PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and was a recipient of the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In addition to his engagement with visual arts, Paisid is also a dancer and certified teacher of yoga with interests in contemplative practices, bodymind philosophy and psychology, somatics, and the science of yoga and movement.

Paisid is the founder of The Ground Flow, home of dance and playful embodiment on the island of Phangan in Thailand, where he currently teaches yoga, meditation, and movement.

Horizontal Together tells the story of 1960s art and queer culture in New York through the overlapping circles of Andy Warhol, underground filmmaker Jack Smith and experimental dance star Fred Herko. Taking a pioneering approach to this intersecting cultural millieu, the book uses a unique methodology that draws on queer theory, dance studies and the analysis of movement, deportment and gesture to look anew at familiar artists and artworks, but also to bring to light queer artistic figures’ key cultural contributions to the 1960s New York art world.

Illustrated with rarely published images and written in clear and fluid prose, Horizontal Together will appeal to specialists and general readers interested in the study of modern and contemporary art, dance, and queer history.

Publications

States of Mind: James Waring’s Zen contribution to the James Waring project, ed. by Carrie Noland (book manuscript in preparation)
Plastiques: Jack Smith, Ruth St. Denis, and the Dance of Gestures. in The Tableau Vivant, ed. by Vito Adriaensens (under contract, Edinburgh University Press)
Spirit: Breath / Techne: Craft in Alessandro Di Pietro: Ghostwriting Paul Thek, edited with text by Cornelia Mattiacci and Peter Benson Miller (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2024), 32-27
Horizontal Together: Art, dance, and queer embodiment in 1960s New York* Manchester University Press (Re-thinking Art’s Histories series, 2021)
An Artist in the Secular World: Paul Thek’s Relics** American Art 35, Number 1 (Spring 2021): 40-61
Embodied Abstraction: The Dancing and Drawing of Nancy Topf PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 127 (2021): 116-125
Paul Thek’s Warrior Leg EyeLevel Blog, Smithsonian American Art Museum, July 25, 2019
Reading Jack Smith's The Beautiful Book Reparatively Art Journal 78, Number 1 (Spring 2019): 30-47
Review of Wade Guyton's One Month Ago caa.reviews, May 25, 2017
Real Professionals? Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and Dance PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 110 (2015): 1-12
A Roundup of Performance >< Archive Initiatives Six Degrees, New Museum, New York, May 29, 2014
Who Owns Dance? Contemporary Performance in the Art Museum Movement Research Performance Journal 42 (Spring 2013)
Fabulous Freddy Movement Research Performance Journal 41 (Summer 2012)
Interview with David Gordon in Platform 2012: Judson Now, ed. Jenn Joy and Judy Hussie-Taylor (Danspace Project: New York, 2012, reprinted 2018), 89-94
* Shortlisted for the de la Torre Bueno Dance Studies Book Prizes ** Winner of the 2019 Terra Foundation for American Art International Essay Prize

INSTAGRAM