Hal Foster (Ph.D., CUNY, 1990) is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where he teaches and publishes in the areas of modernist and contemporary art, architecture, and theory. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foster is a founding editor of Zone Magazine and Books, and he writes regularly for October (which he co-edits), Artforum, and The London Review of Books. He is the recipient of Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism in College Art Association in 2012 and the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing in 2010, and he has been the Siemens Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2018 he delivered the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery.

His recent books include: Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataile, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (Princeton University Press, 2020); What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso, 2020); and Conversations about Sculpture, with Richard Serra (Yale University Press, 2018).