Jessica Seigel is an NYU journalism professor and award-winning writer who uses science and history to investigate cultural myths. She is also director of the estate of Judy Seigel, a pioneering alternative photographer and painter whose wide-ranging reach included writing: she was co-founding editor of the Women Artists News with publisher Cynthia Navaretta in 1975, along with Pat Passlof, Donna Marxer, and Susan Schwalb (design director.)

The estate spearheaded the WAN Database Project to make this central arts publication of Second Wave feminism accessible for scholarship today. Teaming up with NYU's Research Technology Services department and an independent developer, the project digitized 94 issues and 3,000 articles from 1975 to 1991 using Claude AI, with document assistance from The Feminist Institute. The searchable, downloadable database is now online at www.judyseigel.com/wan.

Over 17 years, WAN's more than 600 volunteer contributors chronicled the creativity, politics, and protests of a movement in pitched battle for recognition in a canon that had all but shut out women, reshaping the contemporary art world. They included Adrian Piper, Cassandra Langer, Faith Ringgold, Joan Semmel, Joyce Kozloff, Lowery Sims, Lucy Lippard, Martha Edelheit, May Stevens, and Miriam Schapiro, among many other now-legendary names.