Katie A. Pfohl is a curator and writer who centers collaborations with artists and community. Her work seeks to amplify the voices of artists, foster connections between people, and create space to engage with the urgent issues of our time.

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Pfohl is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. At DIA, she is working on a reinstallation of the museum's contemporary galleries, collaborating with curatorial colleagues as well as local and national advisors to reimagine the space and collection. She is also expanding the scope and impact of the museum's contemporary collection through acquisitions and research, and developing new exhibitions, projects, and partnerships.

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From 2015-2022, she was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. At NOMA, she curated almost 30 exhibitions, acquired or commissioned over 100 works of art by local, national and international artists, worked collaboratively on innovative educational programming and community engagement, and reinstalled the museum’s 20th century and contemporary galleries. Major projects included Mending the Sky (2020), which featured eleven artists responding to a world in distress, Bodies of Knowledge (2019), which invited artists to reflect on questions surrounding monuments and memory, Ear to the Ground (2019), which explored environmental activism in contemporary art, and Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (2018), which focused on forgotten or marginalized histories of the city.

 

She has worked on projects with artists Garrett Bradley, Wafaa Bilal, Beili Liu, Regina Agu, Katrina Andry, Cristina Molina, Alia Ali, Athena LaTocha, Dawn DeDeaux, Leonardo Drew, Adriana Corral, and Thao Nguyen Phan, among many others. For NOMA, Pfohl acquired works by artists including Firelei Báez, Jamilah Sabur, Olafur Eliasson, Ana Hernandez, Baseera Khan, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Lynda Benglis, Tavares Strachan, Clarissa Tossin, Mildred Thompson, The Propeller Group, Margaret Burroughs, Torkwase Dyson, and Diedrick Brackens.

 

Pfohl’s projects have received funding and awards from The Warhol Foundation, The National Endowment of the Humanities, The Terra Foundation, The Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, and The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, among others. Her exhibitions have been recognized by many publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Burnaway.  

 

In 2014, Pfohl completed her Ph.D. in art history at Harvard University, and in 2006 she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Pfohl has held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the LSU Museum of Art.