Kathy Battista

Kathy Battista is a writer, educator and curator of exhibitions in museums, galleries and nonprofits. Her research is primarily focused on cross-generational feminist art, in particular performance and body-oriented practice. Most recently she curated Non-Objectified at Kino Saito Foundation, Verplanck, NY; Resonance at marytwo, Lucerne, Switzerland; The Art of Fashion at Fountain House Gallery, NYC; Escape Attempts at Nazarian Curcio Gallery, Los Angeles; and E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria. She has authored numerous books, including 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 a book on artist estates and foundations, Creative Legacies: Critical Issues in Artist Estates, for Lund Humphries (2020).

Battista has over 20 years of leadership positions in the art world. She founded the interaction program at Artangel, a renowned public art agency in London; the MA Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York; and the Chez Fifi artist residency in Branford, CT; and co-founded 89 Greene, a project space on the Lower East Side of New York. She has also served as editor in chief of the Benezit Dictionary of Art for Oxford University Press and is on several international nonprofit boards and committees. She holds a PhD from the University of London, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA from Fordham University.