Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an art historian and curator whose work develops a queer, transcultural approach to contemporary art and to the writing of art history. Their scholarship asks how art histories might be narrated relationally—across geographies, materials, exhibitions, and lived experience—rather than through singular origins or linear accounts of influence. Patel describes these plural forms of narration as “they-stories”: accounts that resist singular authorship and hold multiple positions in relation without forcing them into coherence. Across books, essays, and exhibitions, this work also cultivates an archipelagic feeling, attending to passages, breaks, proximities, and constellations across dispersed contexts.

Patel is the author of Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories (forthcoming January 2027), recipient of the 2026 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017). Their editorial practice extends this interest in plural and collaborative forms of knowledge-making. Projects include the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022); the forthcoming peer-reviewed volume Creole Archive: Jacek Kolasinski (Intellect Books, 2028); and co-edited journal projects including “What Can Trans Do?” (Art Journal, 2026), “TRANS-ASIA” (ASAP/J, 2024), and “Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating” (Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2021). Their short-form criticism and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and frieze.

Curating is another sustained dimension of Patel’s scholarly practice. As curator-at-large at UrbanGlass, they organized the 2023–2024 exhibition series “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” Earlier projects include the British Arts Council–funded “Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street” (Manchester, 2007) and a decade of exhibition-making in Miami. At Miami Beach Urban Studios at Florida International University, Patel organized solo and group exhibitions and produced five accompanying exhibition catalogues, bringing exhibition-making into sustained conversation with critical and scholarly writing.

Patel’s research and curatorial practice have been supported by a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Danish Arts Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. They are associate professor of global contemporary art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, co-editor of Manchester University Press’s “Re-thinking Art’s Histories” series, associate editor for ASAP/J, and a member of the editorial advisory committee of the Getty Research Journal. They previously chaired the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open and edited contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews. Before joining Temple, Patel spent a decade at Florida International University, where they directed the MFA program in Visual Arts. They hold a BA in art history with distinction from Yale University and a PhD in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester.