Catherine Damman is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities. A scholar of modern and contemporary art history, she specializes in the entwined histories of experimental dance, theater, film, music, and the visual arts.

She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2018, and her doctoral research was supported by the Chester Dale Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She is at work on a manuscript that reexamines the formation of “performance” in American discourses, both artistic and academic, in the 1970s. Informed by feminist, queer, and critical race perspectives, the book project conceptualizes the stakes of disciplinary taxonomies in relation to artistic reevaluations of labor—at precisely the same moment that, increasingly, subjectivity itself was conscripted into the demands of a service-based economy.

Her writing can be found in Artforum, Bookforum, Art in America, Art Journal, The Germanic Review, and Women & Performance, as well as in publications for the Walker Art Center, the ICA London, and MoMA PS1