page_title: Kay Turner
section_title: Academic/Public Folklore Work
hierarchical_section_title: Kay Turner / Career / Academic/Public Folklore Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographer: Belinda Kremer
context_page_description: Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She is noted for her feminist writings and performances on subjects such as women’s home altars, fairy tale witches, and historical goddess figures. She co-founded “Girls in the Nose, ” a lesbian feminist rock punk band that anticipated riot grrl.
context_section_description: Kay Turner received her B.A. (with honors) in Literature and Philosophy from Douglass College of Rutgers University in 1971. In 1979/1990, she earned her MA/PhD, respectively, in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation project, "Mexican American Women's Home Altars: The Art of Relationship," was the first of its kind to give serious study to home altars and vernacular altars as an aesthetic form. The subsequent book project, Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women's Altars (1999), is the most widely read of all of her publications, which also include books on the pop star Madonna, lesbian love letters, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas, and on Grimms' fairy tales queerly revealed. Her research focuses on women’s studies, queer studies, and folk and contemporary art. In particular, she introduced queer theory to fairy tale scholarship with Trangressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, edited with Pauline Greenhill (2012). Turner’s current book project is What a Witch: The Wise Woman in History, Folklore, and Popular Culture. 
  Her work in folklore and performance evolved from two foundational art and performance projects of the early 1970s: Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the Night, a feminist spirituality collective and art journal she founded in 1975 and The Oral Tradition, a lesbian music and comedy group she founded in 1972. For much of her career Turner has experimented with combining folklore scholarship and queer performance in innovative ways.
  Before earning her PhD, Turner worked as the interim director of the Folk Arts Collections at the San Antonio Museum of Art from 1982 to 1984. In 1984, Kay Turner, Pat Jasper, and Betsy Peterson founded the non-profit folk arts organization Texas Folklife Resources. Turner continued on as the associate director of Texas Folklife Resources until 1991. Turner went on to work as director of the Brooklyn Arts Council's Folk Arts Program from 2000-2014. In 2011, she joined the board of the New York Folklore Society. Turner has published articles in journals such as Journal of American Folklore and Western Folklore.  As a public folklorist, Turner has researched, organized, and produced public programs, museum exhibitions, and folk music festivals. Turner served as president of the  American Folklore Society  from 2015–2018. She is also the founder and chief instigator (1989-2016) of “The Croning,” a ritual celebration of women folklorists over 50 years old held every three years at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. 
  In 2002, she became an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Currently still teaching there, some of her courses have included (selected): Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: Ephemeral Cultures, Sexual Cultures; The Performed Story in Culture: Oral Narrative Theory and Practice; Performance of Protest; Performance of Death, Disease and Trauma; The Fairy Tale in Performance; Dead Performers: Ghosts, Specters, and Phantoms; Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Temporality and Performance; Pedagogies of the Ephemeral; The Witch in Flight.
  From 2000-2014 Turner was Director of Folk Arts at the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). She has a rich knowledge of Brooklyn’s diverse folk and community-based arts and artists practicing in a range of disciplines—music, dance, material arts, narrative, and foodways. Turner has initiated a number of field research projects resulting in concert performances and exhibitions such as Praise in the Park: Musical Expressions of Faith; Local Eyes: Folk Photographers in Brooklyn; Williamsburg Bridge 100ᵗʰ Anniversary Celebration; Folk Feet: Celebrating Traditional Dance in Brooklyn; Here Was New York: Twin Towers in Memorial Images; Brooklyn Maqam: Arab Music Festival; Black Brooklyn Renaissance 1960-2010; Harborlore; Half the Sky: Brooklyn Women in Traditional Performances; Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn; and The Sweetest Song: Brooklyn Traditional Singers and Their Songs.
  Turner 
caption: "Kay" by Belinda Kremer (2004)
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