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 unorthodox modes of transdisciplinary scholarship.Katsof’s work is characterized by a poetic sensibility, critical thinking, research, public engagement, and collaboration. The latter was embodied by the performances she created with Dana Yahalomi, Director of the performance research group Public Movement. While she is also a scholar of exhibition histories, Katsof’s approach to curating is through the lens of the artist-as-curator, and she works in service of the radical vulnerability that artmaking requires. Many of Katsof’s exhibitions have been organized in spaces that emerged from the alternative space movement including White Columns, MoMA PS1, Participant Inc., and A. Vermin — the artist-run gallery she organized in her Glasgow apartment for three years. Katsof has published essays and given lectures on numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Gordon Hall, David Hammons, and Hannah Höch. 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 relationship between nature and fascist ideology, from a decolonial perspective. Her essays on the ideology of cultivation, gardens, and the history of exhibitions have been included in volumes such as On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany, and Cultivation; The Artist as Curator: An Anthology; and How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse. Katsof has edited books including Brendan Fernandes: Inaction and Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present. She is Curator for the Estate of Yusef Lateef and an editorial collective member at Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Katsof was a participant on De Appel Art Centre’s Curatorial Programme, earned an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and a BA in the Liberal Arts from Hampshire College. Katsof is an PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and Part-Time Assistant Professor, Departments of Integrated Arts and Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College — The New School.