Douglas Crimp was born in 1944 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He became an internationally recognized art historian, critic, AIDS activist, and scholar of queer studies. His highly influential essays of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, especially “Pictures” (1979) theorized postmodernism as a critique of desire and subjectivity in visual representation, helping to radicalize the discourse about contemporary art. In the late 1980’s, in response to the suffering caused by the AIDS epidemic, he became a militant AIDS activist and in 1987 edited an issue of the journal October on “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism.” Published later as a book, the issue brought Douglas’s ideas about postmodernism to bear on AIDS, engaging in urgent struggles over representations of the disease and of homosexuality. Arguing against aestheticizing and “phobic” images of people with AIDS, Douglas said, “We don’t need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end the epidemic.” But the AIDS epidemic also led Douglas to revise some of his earlier aesthetic ideas. As he writes in the introduction to On the Museum’s Ruins, a collection of his postmodernism essays, “ultimately it was the specter of death that revealed to me the limits of my conception of postmodernism.” If radical art is going to become part of social praxis, he says, it must move outside the conventional institutions of artistic distribution and reception and change the way art functions in society. Following his departure as an editor of October, he became a professor of art history and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He gave talks and wrote essays about the films of Andy Warhol, the dance of Yvonne Rainer, among many other topics. He married Yoshiaki Mochizuki. In 2016, he published Before Pictures, a memoir that weaves together his early artistic and sexual experimentation in downtown Manhattan. His collected essays about dance and about dance on film will be published in the spring by Dancing Foxes Press.