Dr. Katherine Rochester is a New York-based art historian and curator. She was previously the curatorial director at Lehmann Maupin gallery and director of curatorial research at VIA Art Fund, where she commissioned major new works of art in partnership with artists, institutions, and biennials. Projects included multi-media endeavors by Wu Tsang and Lynn Hershman Leeson; major new sculptural works by Sarah Sze and Jeffrey Gibson; and ambitious public art projects by Charles Gaines and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, among many others. Previously, Rochester was at the Getty Research Institute, where she co-curated exhibitions such as Monumentality (2018) and Bauhaus Beginnings (2019), which spanned the breadth of the Institute’s vast collections. Prior to the Getty, she held positions at the ICA Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. A specialist in modern and contemporary art and film, her research focuses on experimental media, expanding its boundaries to include women, and revealing previously unknown histories of the moving image in relation to the gallery. In addition to art criticism in magazines such as Artforum, and an edited book series with Sternberg Press, she publishes and lectures widely on experimental media, feminist approaches to modernism, theories of ornament, critiques of orientalism, and theories of ecologies in crisis. She has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Getty Research Institute, and her scholarship has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Rochester has received numerous awards, including a Gold Medal Award from the American Association of Museums. She holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.