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.
While Katsof is a scholar of exhibition histories, her approach to curating is often 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 organised in spaces that emerged from the artist-led alternative space movement including White Columns, MoMA PS1, PARTICIPANT INC., Regina Rex, and A. Vermin. Among Katsof’s curatorial projects are Towards the Unknown, a travelling exhibition of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by autophysiopsychic musician Yusef Lateef, and she serves as Curatorial Advisor to the artist’s estate.
Katsof has published essays and given lectures on numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, 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 behaviours take place, and where ideology is staged. Katsof writes about 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. Katsof’s writing about fascism and ecology mobilises and extends her doctoral work on coloniality, racial capitalism and possession in relation to the exhibition as a site for subject-formation. Her essays have been published in volumes including On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation; Interior Garden; The Artist As Curator: An Anthology; How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse; and As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now?
Katsof has edited books including Brendan Fernandes: Inaction and Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present. 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 has two decades of experience as an educator. She teaches performance studies, visual studies, curatorial studies, environmental arts, 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.
Katsof has participated in fellowships, residencies, and training at De Appel Arts Center; New Museum; MoMA PS1; Denniston Hill, and Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. She 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 .