Kay Turner


Kay Turner is a public folklorist, scholar, and artist working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, and folklore. Turner served as president of the American Folklore Society from 2015–2018.

Personal life

Turner was born in 1948 in Detroit, Michigan and currently lives between Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas.

Career

Kay Turner received her B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from Rutgers University in 1971. In 1979/1990, she earned her MA/PhD, respectively, in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas. 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, is the most widely read of all of her publications. 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.
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 Texas Folklife Resources. She 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.
Along with Gretchen Phillips and Betsy Peterson, Kay Turner formed the lesbian-feminist rock band Girls in the Nose in 1985 in Austin, Texas. The band performed between 1985 and 1996, but has since reunited in 2015 to tour in celebration for its 35th year anniversary in 2020. The band has several recordings: “Chant to the Full Moon, Oh Ye Sisters ” ; “Origin of the World” ; “Girls in the Nose” ; “Live from the Middle Ages”.
After moving to Brooklyn in 1998, Turner continued her musical interests with guitarist Viva De Concini and bass player Mary Feaster, who, with Turner, comprise the band and music co-writers for “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song,” which she began organizing and performing in 2013. Turner used contemporary queer scholarship by José Esteban Muñoz, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lisa Duggan, Heather Love, and others as the basis for song lyrics aimed at bringing queer arts and ideas to a broader public. Turner is lead singer and songwriter in both groups. She has toured widely and released two CDs.
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.
In 2000, 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 : 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. 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, who served as president of the American Folklore Society from 2015–2018, has said "To be a folklorist is to be entrusted with a diverse body of critical cultural knowledge, art, and practice and to be just ornery enough to believe the world is better off if we share it out in teaching, researching, writing, consulting, public programming, advocating, archiving, and engaging with each other as members of our Society."

Awards and Honors

Performances
Ongoing:
Talks and Lectures
Curatorial
Books
Chapters and Essays
Video Work