Nicholas Muellner Nonfiction Reading and Q&A: Love in a Time of Allegory

Love in a Time of Allegory asks how we can still feel, desire, and imagine in an age of relentless realism. Moving between images and text, Nicholas Muellner’s illustrated essay turns to allegory as a way of thinking through politics, love, and meaning when private life is inseparable from public crisis. Muellner will present the scripted slide lecture that formed the framework for this book, and was, in turn, shaped by the finished manuscript.

Nicholas Muellner is an artist and writer whose six single-author books include Love in a Time of Allegory (2026), Lacuna park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography (2019), The Amnesia Pavilions (2012) and In Most Tide an Island (2018), which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook Award, and selected as an outstanding book of the year in Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, his writings have been published by SPBH Editions, MACK Books, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, Routledge and others. Muellner has performed slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA P.S.1, The Guggenheim Museum, the Carnegie Museum, The Photographers Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by the 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the John Gutmann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, among others. Muellner received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA from Temple University. He is a founding Co-Director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.