Dr Oriana Fox, PhD is an American artist and para-academic based in London who works primarily with video and performance to explore the connections between self-disclosure, non-conformity, creativity, belonging and mental health.

Fox made her first piece of video art as part of a larger quest to find the perfect feminist role model. Searching through the ubiquitous portrayals of women in mainstream culture to no avail, Fox turned to feminist and queer representations to find what was missing, that is, individuals who question the status quo and are shameless in revealing their own imperfections and fallibility. Following their lead to expand her own personal boundaries and push against societal expectations, Fox has taken on a whole host of roles from housewives and exercise goddesses to self-help gurus and Viennese actionists. She takes pleasure in infusing the fantasies of those great mythmakers, TV and Hollywood, with the assertive passion and criticality of feminist art. Mining self-help culture and the makeover paradigm for all that they are worth, whilst also parodying and critiquing its quick fixes and the erasure of labour and pain that they perpetuate, Fox has found a kind of agency in ambivalence. As the years have progressed, she has also taken increasing risks to use her self in her work. Still unable to decide between the perks of the mainstream and the liberation of the avant-garde, Fox has begun filming her own chat show to put this question to guest performers, artists and intellectuals with the hope that one day she herself will become as influential as Oprah.

With a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, Dr Oriana Fox has shown her work in renowned art venues such as the ICA, Tate Modern and Britain, Orchard Gallery in New York and Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna. She currently lectures in art histories and critical contextual studies at The Art Academy, London, and City and Guilds of London Art School in Kennington.

CV

Personal Information

Oriana Fox is based in London.
born 1978
Place of Birth: New York, NY

Education

GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, London
2011 – 2018   PhD in Visual Cultures
2002 – 2003   MA in Fine Art (distinction)
2000 – 2001   Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, St. Louis
1996 – 2000   BFA in Painting

Selected Exhibitions/ Performances/ Socially Engaged Projects 

Conferences, Panels and Symposia

Fox, Oriana, “Beyond Before and After: Feminist Performance Art as Radical Self-care” In Revolving Documents, Diaphanes Berlin/Zurich, 2025.

Meredith A. Brown, Oriana Fox and Frances Jacobus-Parker, “Making Art with Your Kids: Generation, Cooperation and Desire in Parent–Child Artwork of the 1970s”, Collaboration and Its Discontents, Courtauld Books Online, 2017

Fox, Oriana, “The Perfect Student”, On Perfection: An Artists’ Symposium, Chicago: Intellect Books, 2013

Fox, Oriana, “The Protagonist” blog on cteditions.posterous.com, contributor 2011–2012

Fox, Oriana, “All Man, All Woman and Half Bear”, Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2011

Fox, Oriana, “Once More with Feeling”, Feminist Review, issue no. 96, 2010

Fox, Oriana and Charlotte Troy (eds.), The Moon, London: CT Editions, 2009

What others are saying about Oriana:

“[S]elf-cultivation is inherently fraught with toxicity. Acknowledging this allows for the ambivalence and unpredictability of singularity, an ethos that pervades Fox’s The O Show in which ‘exposure therapy’ as a means of self-determination that is not reducible to capital is validated.”
– Maria Walsh (Therapeutic Aesthetics, 2021, p. 183)

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“In Oriana Fox’s Cock and Cunt Play today, the bawdy influence of the English panto is evident and femicide is replaced by a less tragic yet ambiguous conclusion. When Cunt asks Cock to do the dishes, Cock agrees happily which turns Cunt on so they begin having sex. In true psychoanalytic spirit, the sexual relation involves more than two parties. Inspired also by Annie Sprinkle’s performance Public Cervix announcement, where Sprinkle invites audiences to individually take a look at her cervix using a speculum and a flashlight, Fox adds Cervix, played by Judy Batallion [..] and also Sperm [played by Sharon Bennett]. While Cervix takes on the role of narrator and also tackles the washing up which the others seem to forget about, Sperm annoys the couple by whispering incel conspiracies in Cock’s ear and shouting about infidelity and war. Rather than essentialising the gender along biological binaries, Fox’s comical revision stays with the trouble of one and other, lots of others, to be exact, as the audience plays an active part. This Cock and Cunt Play liberates sex from the illusion of a separate, private sphere, and explodes the apparent duality of the couple into a network of psychosocial relations that are subject to complex and continuous negotiation.”
– Alexandra Kokoli (2024 paper presented at the conference ‘Wild Thoughts: For a Feminist Psychoanalysis-to-come“)

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“By drawing on the archives of the Women’s Art Library, re-performing moments from the history of feminist art, Oriana Fox’s new project is not about creating a historical document. Rather it is about the potential of relocating the historical in the present, allowing a conversation to take place between different moments. Where camp humour rises up in the place of utopian dreams, a space is opened for us to think about the potential of feminism in the contemporary moment, to see whether it is as a drunken drag queen still singing the same sad songs, or whether
within the fan’s desire for a previous moment of feminism the whisperings of new forms of feminism can be found.”
– Catherine Grant, “Reaching for The Moon: Replaying Feminist Art & Activism” in The Moon, 2009, p. 17)

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“Ventriloquism, lip-synching, and appropriation all play subversive roles in the post-feminist cocktail of Oriana Fox’s videography. Tackling television’s role as a myth-maker she finds beauty in her own perceived reflection in popular culture. But unlike Narcissus, her mini-movies beget sequels rather than tragic ends. The result is a subdued laugh track that leaves the viewer numb with joy.”
– Mitchell Marco

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“I watched all [of Ms.Fox’s] formulaic replays with wistful enjoyment; I didn’t know every reference, but they resonated with something so cemented in my pop cultural imaginary that I recognised every single cliché. Embarrassingly enough, I knew the feeling of wanting to be that character, making those moves, saying those lines in that American voice. Sharing a strange accord with the performer, here were our teenage fantasies resurfacing resplendent and poignant as they had been over ten years ago…

… Mediating her self-representation through clichés and her own a retro-nostalgic lens, Fox’s work turns such banality on its head. If the performance of originality and authenticity are crucial to confessional culture, then replaying a scene from a classic movie denies affirmative biographical access to the ‘shimmering truth’ of another, but opens up a different point of entry to possible truths, arguably more intriguing in their ambiguity.”
– Marianne Mulvey, (“Is There Sincerity In Hollow Speech?”, NOWISWERE, No. 3, January 2009.)
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“Oriana Fox excavates the inheritance of the past on the present generation of young artists by disjunctively animating it through her own mimicry. Fox’s work mines the power and embarrassment the recent past has over those who follow in its wake, be it that of new generations of women who have a somewhat skeptical relation to being identified as feminist, who re-encode that term through a rampant consumerism that sweeps away the idealism of their mothers’ generation, or of the child who has become adult and still has to deal with the visitations of their parents continued determination. The reversal of generation that Oriana Fox plays out, from younger to older, folds the sequence of inheritance back on itself with sly effect, destabilising the careful chronological sequence through which the past – and the present – are carefully controlled and held in place.”
– Suhail Malik
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“Alluding to milestones in both pop culture and the art world, Fox’s imagery is bright and bubble-gum sweet, her voice-overs are impeccable, and most importantly her understanding of how contemporary women rely on and simultaneously shy away from their foremothers’ struggle is accurately respectful while maintaining a necessary playfulness. She invites everyone to enjoy feminism even if the word makes ‘em itch.”
– Alison O’Daniel

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“Oriana Fox’s Consciousness, Understanding ‘N’ Trust (2004) examines a seventies-era, second wave feminism and a history of feminist art with the nuanced advantage of a hindsight of our contemporary moment. Fox plays each character in the consciousness raising with an amazing subtlety of expression. With perfect timing she mimes lines taken from sources as diverse as The Stepford Wives to Laura Cottingham’s Not For Sale, a documentary about seventies feminist artistic practice. Other references are made to VALIE EXPORT’s ActionPants: Genital Panic (1969), Cindy Sherman Untitled (Film Stills) # 6 and #96, (1977-79) and Janine Antoni’s Loving Care (1992) and, more generally, to craft-based art production. These sources span four decades of feminist art making and thinking and are vastly different in intent, tone and attitude. Fox integrates them into a seamless conversation that is thoughtful, humorous and engaging.”
– Risa Puleo