Amanda Cachia (Ph.D. UCSD, 2017) is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and Affiliate Faculty in the Disability Studies B.A. Her research interests include disability art history, theory and activism, crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics, museums, institutional critique, and social justice, and critical disability approaches to translation, movement, medicine, and health. Cachia is the author of two books, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is currently working on her third book, Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, which is under advance contract with Manchester University Press. She has guest edited two Special Issues for peer-reviewed journals, including “Curating New Openings: Re-thinking Diversity in the Museum,” Art Journal (2017); and “Transdisciplinarity in Disability, Art, and Design,” Journal of Arts and Communities (2024). A widely published scholar, Cachia’s texts have appeared in 20 edited volumes, and in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Curatorial Studies, Woman’s Art Journal, Journal of Modern Craft, Senses & Society, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Museums and Social Issues, and other venues. Her article, “Crip Curation and the Aesthetics of the Undeliverable” published in the Journal of Visual Culture won the the Early Career Research Prize from the International Association for Visual Culture (2022). Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian.
Since 2010, Cachia has organized 20 art exhibitions devoted to the work of disabled artists. In 2024, her exhibition Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University was supported by a $180,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. From 2023-2024, she was a curatorial consultant and commissioned essayist for the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute initiative PST ART exhibition and catalogue For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, Disability held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She is currently developing the major touring exhibition Vital Signs: From Patient to Power with Mid-America Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA which will be hosted by numerous galleries across the United States from 2027-2032. Cachia is also a curatorial and disability advisor for a major exhibition being developed about art and disability from the 19th century to the present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028.
Cachia’s research, writing, and curatorial work have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Millard Meiss Publication Fund through the College Art Association, and Ford Foundation. She is a recipient of the $50,000 National Art and Disability Award (Established Category) from Creative Australia (2024), and the Irving K. Zola Disability Studies Emerging Scholar Award (2014).