Editor-in-Chief | Artistic Director | Founding Editor

Jessie is a dual doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought and Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She holds an MA in the History of Art from the Williams Graduate Program at the Clark Art Institute and a BA in Comparative Literature from Kenyon College. Her research focuses on relationships between nineteenth-century text, image, and sculpture. Other interests include art historiography, air and atmosphere, illustrated books, poetry & poetics, aesthetic effects, and theories of imagination & experience.

Contact: alperinj@uchicago.edu

Senior Managing Editor | Founding Editor

Inês is an educator and essayist from Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. Her research interests include Lusophone identity, colonial extractivism, cultural-linguistic translation, and literary intersections between illustration, music, and text.

Editor of Visual Arts | Senior Editor

Jenna is a current graduate student at American University. Her interests include material culture and portrayals of gender and everyday life from the Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Her thesis will examine the complex portrayal of gender and class in Caspar Netscher's genre painting of a woman making lace. Outside her studies, Jenna has interned at the Medici Archive Project, in Florence, Italy, and the Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington, DC.

Creative Writing Editor

Carmine is a teacher, a translator, a creative non-fiction writer, and a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Chicago. His work can be found in peer reviewed journals, anthologies of translated Chinese philosophers, and academic-adjacent magazines. He is writing a dissertation on orientalist translation and the poetics of rivers.

Creative Writing Editor

Nuno Marques is an ecocritical researcher, poet and translator of ecopoetry at the KTH environmental humanities laboratory, Stockholm. He is working on a book on breathing and suffocating in ecopoetry as part of the project Air Epistemologies: Practices of Ecopoetry in Ibero American Atmospheres.

Contributing Editor

Léa Fougerolle is a Ph.D. student in Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she studies the topic of sensory experiences in 20th and 21st century French and Belgian texts (mostly poetry). Among her academic interests are contemporary and experimental literature, the way literature approaches environmental issues, synesthesia-related questions, the aesthetics of everyday life, and particularly smellscapes and the writing of olfactory experiences.

Contributing Editor

Leif Turner is a doctoral student of comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Broadly, his work touches on Marxist formalism, psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century novel.

Artist-Not-in-Residence 2021-2022

Charlotte is a New York City based visual artist and makeup artist working in film and theatre. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Kenyon College in 2018. During the 2019-2020 school year Charlotte worked at the Juilliard School in the wigs and makeup department where she learned to ventilate, customize theatrical wigs and run crew for theatrical productions and operas. Charlotte’s background in both art history and creative writing has greatly influenced her personal makeup work and art direction. Charlotte is grateful to be working with Venti Journal. As the Venti artist, Charlotte designs illustrations for our covers and issues.

Faculty Advisor

Andrei is a Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He has published monographs on Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford, 2015) and A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (Zone, 2019), and edited Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (2013) and Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness (2015, both with Mechtild Widrich). He is interested in logic, subjectivity, and meaning in art and life.