Alhena Katsof is a writer who works in close conversation with artists. Her practice encompasses performance art, visual art, exhibition making, and unorthodox modes of interdisciplinary scholarship.
While Katsof is a scholar of exhibition histories, her approach to curating has often been through the lens of the artist-as-curator, and she works in service of the radical vulnerability that art making requires. Many of Katsof’s exhibitions have been organized in spaces that emerged from the artist-led alternative space movement including White Columns, MoMA PS1, PARTICIPANT INC., Regina Rex, and A. Vermin. Among the Katsof’s curatorial projects are Towards the Unknown, a traveling exhibition of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by the autophysiopsychic musician Yusef Lateef and Telepathic Improvisation, a solo exhibition by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz that was organized with Mason Leaver-Yap.
Katsof writes about the artist Hannah Höch’s material output and her illicit activities during the Third Reich, which included growing plants prohibited by Nazi horticulturalists while simultaneously burying in her garden artworks banned by the fascist regime. Her presentations on the subject, which have taken place at Bridget Donahue, Rongwrong, and the Center for Experimental Lectures, explore seeds as archives, autochthony, fascism, colonialism, and the ideological distinction between humans and nature.
Her essays about fascism, whiteness, possession and gardens have been included in volumes such as On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation (Valiz) and Interior Garden (Hatje Cantz). This work is informed by decolonial theory, gender studies, and black studies.
Elsewhere, Katsof’s writing about exhibitions has been published in volumes including The Artist As Curator: An Anthology (Mousse Publishing); How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (MIT Press); and As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now? (Paper Monument).
Katsof has written about numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Nicole Eisenman, Andrea Geyer, and Gordon Hall, and she has conducted interviews with artists and curators including Nana Adusei-Poku, Laura Aldridge, and Nina Canell. Together with Dana Yahalomi, she co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Neirmann (Sternberg Press). She is a member of the editorial collective for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory.
Katsof participated in training and fellowships at De Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam; the New Museum in New York City; and MoMA PS1 in Queens, as well as curatorial residencies and workshops at Denniston Hill and Banff Center for Arts and Creativity.
Katsof worked as research assistant for Elena Filipovic’s book-length study David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (Afterall); and as part of the research team for the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, a project of the Artist Archives Initiative hosted by Fales Library at New York University.
Katsof has two decades of experience as an educator working with high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students in performance studies, visual studies, curatorial studies, and fine arts—often in the Liberal Arts context. She has taught courses at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; New York University; and Sotheby’s Summer Institute. She is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts | The New School where she began teaching in 2017.
Katsof earned a BA in the Liberal Arts from Hampshire College, an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and a PhD in Performance Studies at New York University .