Kat Zagaria Buckley

Kat Zagaria Buckley is an interdisciplinary arts curator whose exhibitions reimagine the potentialities of art through collaborative junctures. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History with concentrations in Curatorial Studies and Book Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has worked at a wide array of museums and rare book libraries such as the Walters Art Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, the Newberry Library, the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recently, she was the Curatorial Fellow at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She has presented her research on diverse topics such as street art, ruin photography, and postwar fiber art internationally and is a published scholar. Her curated exhibitions include Collections Highlights: Hmong Textiles at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Tête à Tête: Embodying Dialogues at the Zhou B Art Center, Fabric of the Universe at the Adler Planetarium, and the 2017 Masters of Fine Arts Show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for which she was awarded a Graduate Curatorial Fellowship.

Kat’s exhibitions at the University of Southern Maine have received support from the Maine Arts Commission, the Maine Humanities Council, and the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust. Her most recent curated exhibit at the University was Embodying Softness / Excavating Delight with artists Jackie Milad and Libby Paloma. Kat was also a 2023 Hewnoaks Writer/Curator-in-Residence.