Faculty

Profile

Alhena Katsof is a writer and organizer who works in close conversation with artists. Her practice encompasses visual art, performance art, creative non-fiction writing, exhibition-making, and transdisciplinary scholarship. Katsof’s work is characterized by a poetic sensibility, critical thinking, research, and collaboration. While she is a scholar of exhibition histories, her approach to curating is often through the lens of the artist-as-curator, and Katsof works in service of the radical vulnerability that artmaking requires. Many of her projects have been organized in spaces that emerged from the alternative space movement including White Columns, MoMA PS1, Participant Inc., and A. Vermin. Katsof has published essays and given lectures on numerous artists including Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Gordon Hall, David Hammons, Hannah Höch, Katherine Hubbard, and Anh Vo. It was Höch’s burial of the Dada archives in her garden during World War II that set in motion Katsof’s ongoing study of the garden as a site where regulatory control, political resistance and acts of survival play out, where oppressive and transgressive behaviors take place, and where ideology is staged. Her writing about fascism and ecology mobilizes and extends her doctoral work on coloniality, racial capitalism and possession in relation to the exhibition as a site for subject-formation. Katsof's essays have been published in volumes such as Interior Garden; The Artist as Curator: An Anthology; and On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany, and Cultivation. She has edited books including Brendan Fernandes: Inaction and Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present. Katsof is curatorial advisor for the Estate of Yusef Lateef and an editorial collective member at Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Katsof earned a PhD in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, a BA in the Liberal Arts from Hampshire College, and she was a participant on De Appel Art Centre’s Curatorial Programme. Katsof is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies in The Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College.