Catherine Damman

Informed by feminist, queer, disability, and critical race theory, my research and teaching focus on the shifting articulations of the relationship between of form, labor, and value in the history of modern and contemporary art.

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University and a Core Lecturer at Columbia University. Previously, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities (2018–2020). I completed my Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia in 2018, and my doctoral research was supported by a two-year Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art (2016–2018).

I am at work on my monograph, The Work of Art in the Age of Half-Hearted Reproducibility, which radically reconceptualizes the formation of “performance” in American discourses of the 1970s and has been supported by a 2020 Terra Foundation Research Grant. An article on Carl Cheng’s sculptural work, ecological disaster, the commodity form, and Asian American art is forthcoming in the spring 2021 issue of Panorama.

In addition to my scholarly research, I write criticism and essays on contemporary art and performance, and am a frequent contributor to Artforum. My writing can also be found in Bookforum, BOMB, 4Columns, Frieze, Art in America, Art Journal, The Germanic Review, ASAP/Journal, and Women & Performance, as well as in commissioned texts for the Walker Art Center, the ICA London, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MoMA PS1.

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