Kathy Battista, PhD
Dr. Kathy Battista is a writer, educator, and a curator of exhibitions in museums, galleries, and non-profits. Her research is primarily focused on cross generational feminist art, in particular performance and body-oriented practice. Most recently she has curated Everything Has Its Place at Sevil Dolmaci Gallery, Istanbul; you pinned me down like a butterfly on a wall, Marie Jacotey for Ballon Rouge at Pablo’s Birthday; The Art of Fashion at Fountain House Gallery, New York; Escape Attempts at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Los Angeles; and E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria.
She is the author most recently of New York New Wave: The Legacy of Feminist Art in Emerging Practice (2019) and Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (2012). Battista also co-edited (with Bryan Faller) a book on artist estates and foundations: Creative Legacies: Critical Issues in Artist Estates, for Lund Humphries (2020).
Battista has over twenty years of leadership positions in the art world. In 1997 she founded the Interaction program at Artangel, a renowned public art agency in London. She also founded the MA Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, which she helmed for 11 years. She has also served as Editor in Chief of the Benezit Dictionary of Art for Oxford University Press and is on several international non-profit boards and committees. She is currently faculty at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London as well as an Ensemble member of the New School of the Anthropocene.