Dr. Ace Lehner is a New York based interdisciplinary visual culture scholar and artist specializing in critical engagement with identity and representation. Lehner's areas of expertise include queer and trans visual culture and theory, critical approaches to race and representation, modern and contemporary art history and visual culture, photography history and theory, and performance.

Lehner's writing on art and visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, Cultural Politics, REFRACT, The Journal on Images and Culture, and more. Lehner's scholarship has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including a chapter co-authored with Amelia G. Jones in Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (edited by Jane Chin Davidson and Amelia G. Jones, published by Wiley Blackwell, 2023). Lehner recently guest edited the first-ever issue of Art Journal dedicated to trans visual culture. Lehner's current book project, Trans Representations: Decolonizing Visual Theory in Contemporary Photography (working title), is based on their dissertation research, which won them the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in 2020.

Lehner's artistic practice primarily utilizes photography, installation, and performance to mine the complex relationship between representations and the constitution of identities. Lehner has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout the United States and Canada, including Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, NY; the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT; Practice Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; SOMArts, San Francisco, CA; The National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco CA; The GLBT Historical Society Museum, San Francisco, CA; SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; The Wassaic Project in Wassaic NY, La Centrale Gallery Powerhouse, Montreal Quebec, Canada; and many others.

Lehner is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in Fine Arts and the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship. Lehner has delivered numerous public talks and keynotes and organized conference panels throughout North America and Europe.

Lehner has taught at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York NY; International Center of Photography New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently an educator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, NY and a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont.

Lehner holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Fine Art / MA in Visual Studies from California College of the Arts.