Katy Siegel studies modern and contemporary art; her interests include the relationship between art history and criticism and the practice of artists in the social field.

Siegel’s newest book is Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art, which details the collision of American social history and European modern art. (Reaktion: 2011). She co-authored a book on the relationship between contemporary art and commerce, Art Works: Money (Thames & Hudson, 2004). She has written numerous catalog essays for institutions including the Whitney, LA MoCA, SF MoMA, Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof on artists including Takashi Murakami, Lisa Yuskavage, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul Pfeiffer, Mark Bradford, and Richard Tuttle. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-75, which toured internationally and received a prize from the International Association of Art Critics. She is also a contributing editor to Artforum and Editor in Chief of Art Journal.

Prof. Siegel regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate surveys of contemporary art figured by mediums, concepts, and conditions of particular urgency, often relating to current exhibitions and debates; theory and criticism seminars organized around a different theme each semester, like the artist’s self or life and death; and special topics courses such as “Painting in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.” She has supervised a wide range of M.A. theses, including monographic writing on Cady Noland, Norman Lewis, and Kim Soo ja; institutional studies of the MoMA Projects series and museums’ institutionalization of digital art; and historiographic work on the American reception of Gerhard Richter.