Researcher biography

Katherine Guinness is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester and is the author of the first academic monograph on German artist Rosemarie Trockel, Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel (Minnesota: 2019). She is a contributing editor for Art Journal Open and the co-founder of FEARS, the Female Emerging Artist Residency Series.

Katherine has taught in a wide range of departments and programs across the globe, including the University of Sydney (within the Digital Cultures program), the University of New South Wales (Architectural History and the Built Environment), North Carolina State University (Art History and Women's and Gender Studies programs), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Art History). Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Director of Art History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), where she also served as the academic director of the downtown Gallery of Contemporary Art (or GOCA).

She is interested in many topics within contemporary art, all of which she examines with a Marxist-Feminist lens, and is currently working on projects that include: virtual reality and nuclear aesthetics; the relation between anesthetics and the history of aesthetic theory; an edited collection reimagining absurdist theory today; and a project on the political economy and visual culture of social media influencers.

Areas of research