Mal Meisels (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of Art History. They specialize in nineteenth-century French art at the intersections of queer aesthetics, liberalism, and French colonialism in North Africa.

Mal’s research is deeply connected to their teaching and curatorial practices. As a teaching assistant at UCLA, they have developed syllabi and lesson plans that foreground the radical potentials of art historical theory and praxis. In 2025, they curated Queer Kin: Histories of Subversive Love at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in the historic West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. Queer Kin closely attended to moments of LGBTQIA+ mutual care, romantic connection, sexual desire, and family structures within the Clark’s collections.

All Mal’s work is informed by contemporary socio-political realities and their personal background in politics and queer activism. Mal advocated for Jewish queer youth at Yeshiva University, their alma mater, and published an op-ed in The New York Times about the Jewish queer experience.