Noortje de Leij is a lecturer in modern and contemporary art history and theory at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on avant-garde art, Marxist aesthetics, and critical theory, with particular attention to the political dimensions of aesthetic form. Central to her work is the question of how art can function as a form of social critique, and how aesthetic practices articulate and reconfigure social and political tensions.

She received her PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis with a dissertation on the philosophical foundations of critique in the journal of art criticism and theory October, which she analyses in relation to poststructuralist theory and Marxist traditions of immanent critique, with an emphasis on the legacy of the Frankfurt School.

Her current research engages Marxist approaches to art and examines how various twentieth-century artistic practices aesthetically reconfigure classical Marxist categories—such as labour, alienation, reification, and the proletariat—and make visible the tensions within them across different historical and political contexts.

In addition to her academic work, she is active as an art critic and editor. She previously worked as an editor for De Witte Raaf and is currently an editor of Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy.