10 Facts About Vanessa Place

Vanessa Place was born on 1968 and is an American writer and criminal appellate attorney.

Vanessa Place is the co-director of the Los Angeles-based Les Figues Press.

Vanessa Place earned a BA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an MFA at Antioch University, and a JD at Boston University.

In 2012, Vanessa Place was the first poet to perform as part of the Whitney Biennial.

In 2013, Vanessa Place had her first solo art exhibition, The Lawyer is Present, a response to Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in which she listened to confidential confessions from volunteers and then performed them for the public.

Psychoanalytic and philosophic thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan and Immanuel Kant, often figure in Vanessa Place's critical writing and performances.

In 2005, Vanessa Place co-founded Les Figues Press, which "publishes experimental writing and literature in translation with a focus on feminist and queer authors," in Los Angeles.

Vanessa Place has previously published and performed works using courtroom materials.

Vanessa Place has held teaching appointments at the Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Place received criticism for a Twitter art project where she retyped the entire text from the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind in an effort to call attention to the novel's inherent racism, as part of a larger project, Gone with the Wind by Vanessa Place, designed to implicate questions of copyright, the ownership of cultural fictions, the ongoing nature of the white imaginary, and the function of antagonism in social media.