She is the Nonfiction Editor at Chicago Review, and a PhD Student in English and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Cabinet, Avidly, Harvard Review, Jacket2, and Post45 Contemporaries. She has written about clinical vaccine trials, BoJack Horseman and televised friendship, the social history of social distancing, art history and the German far-right, Laurie Anderson, and other topics. She occasionally writes reviews. One time she was interviewed by TIME magazine, which considers her "an expert."
Scherlis works in video, performance, and printmaking. She recently gave a performance lecture on friendship and swimming pools at the Renaissance Society. Other work has been featured in programming for the Smart Museum of Art, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and point contemporain. She once designed a cover for Bauwelt.
Scherlis is a Neubauer Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. Before Chicago, she studied studio art and literature as an undergrad at Harvard, and then lived in Berlin, where she researched hacktivism.
She can be reached at lily.scherlis [at] gmail.com.
"No Free Trials" in Guernica (on vaccine trials)
"Beasts of No Nation: On the Poetics of Invasion and Marwa Helal" in Jacket2 (review essay about Helal's book of poems, Invasive Species)
"Home Alone With the NYT" in Avidly (on "At Home," the NYT's pandemic lifestyle advice section)
Review of Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This in Harvard Review
"Good, Likeable People Who Love Each Other" at Post45 Contemporaries (for a cluster on BoJack Horseman edited by Pamela Thurschwell and Jack Belloli)
"Distantiated Communities: A Social History of Social Distancing" in Cabinet Magazine kiosk
"Remedial Art History for the German Far-Right" in Cabinet Magazine kiosk (on Orientalist campaign aesthetics)
"Ringing in Your Ears" in Cabinet Magazine kiosk (on a Holocaust memorial made of doorbells)