Is Identity given to us, or chosen by us? This course enables students to explore how identity is understood from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, and how it matters to the production and reception of art. Key ideas within this broader question include: the body, ethnicity, gender, health, power, agency, standpoint, fluidity, and intersectionality. We will look at how issues of identity arise in a range of media, genres and themes in contemporary art – including, for example, dance, the self portrait, and queer. Students will engage in reading and discussion in order to grow their knowledge and understanding in these areas, and to reflect on their own experience. Students will develop and present a body of work that responds to this thinking, and write an essay on the ideas and examples that matter to their personal artistic inquiry.