Joyce Joumaa is a 2025–2027 VLC Boris Lurie Fellow whose fellowship project, Calibrated Alien, is part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Matter of Intelligence.

Joumaa’s research project, Calibrated Alien, investigates the historical and contemporary uses of intelligence testing as a tool of classification, racialization, and ultimately exclusion within migration governance. Building on her video installation Memory Contours—initially produced for Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th Venice Biennial exhibition—the artist examines a chapter in the eugenics movement in the United States, specifically “intelligence” drawing tests designed to identify mental deficiency in immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.

For the VLC Fellowship, Joumaa deepens and extends her inquiry into the present, tracing the evolution from early cognitive tests rooted in eugenics to today’s algorithmic decision-making systems that weaponize intelligence to control mobility and enforce racial and ethnic purity. Through archival research, video work, and public programs that combine fiction and documentary, Joumaa engages with the shifting notions of “extraordinary ability” in migration discourse and juridical frameworks.

Joyce Joumaa is a video artist and writer working between Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work explores microhistories in Lebanon and elsewhere to understand how past structures shape contemporary realities. Central to her practice is an interest in the political charge inscribed in space and the social psychology that unfolds from the tensions emerging between the two.

Joumaa’s work has been presented at institutions including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, e-flux Screening Room, Galerie Stewart Hall, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennale, and the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein Sud Centre d’exposition, and Eli Kerr Gallery. Joumaa is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2023 Plein Sud Award.

Boris Lurie Fellowship

The Boris Lurie Fellowship is the first artist-named fellowship at the Vera List Center. Established with a grant from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation and the Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation, it is named after Boris Lurie (1924–2008), Holocaust survivor and founder of the NO!art movement. In tribute to Lurie’s life and The New School’s historic role as university-in-exile during World War Two, it is awarded to an artist living outside the U.S., with special consideration given to those who have faced political hardship. For more information about Boris Lurie and the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, please visit its website.