Amelia LiCavoli is a curator and writer living in Chicago.
For over 20 years she has retained an independent practice that alternates between researching, curating, and publishing.
She is currently writing a book manuscript that documents the underground history of Aldo Tambellini's Black Gate Theater and its integration within experimental-film and electromedia-performance art of the 1960s, which she has been developing "by the midnight oil" since 2014.
Educated in private art schools between Kansas City, New York City, and Chicago; she
holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art (with emphasis in photography & electronic media) and
a Master's degree in Art History, Theory, and Criticism (with emphasis on intermedia art). In 2020 she supplemented these studies with
a second graduate degree in Library and Information Sciences (specializing in archives and special-collection librarianship).
Amelia LiCavoli began her career as a freelance arts critic and arts editor.
Between 2003 and 2013, she published nearly 100 critical essays, reviews of exhibitions and performances, and interviews with artists in newspapers, alternative weeklies, and art-specialist magazines and journals.
She was a participant in the interdisciplinary Black Metal Theory community as a touring presenter, and was a founding editor of the para-academic publication Helvete: a journal of black metal theory (2011-2016).
To give experiential form to her research, she begun curating exhibitions, video & film screenings, and performances in 2012.
These have been hosted at venues across North America and Europe, and include
Black Air (2024-2025), the week-long event The Gate Theater Film Festival 1966/2019, Bleeding Black Noise (2016),
Charlemagne Palestine's solo exhibition divinitusssanimalusssacréusssorganusss (2014),
.blacK~SSStaTic_darK~fuZZZ_dOOm~glitCH. (2013), and Black Thorns in the White Cube (2012).
Before 2020, her work was performed under the name Amelia Ishmael.
† curriculum vitae available by request †