Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality in a bid to dismantle masculine and ableist hegemonies. Research topics of interest include how disabled embodiment offers epistemologies for activist and curatorial praxis in conversation with gender, race and sexuality, and decolonizing museum practices as it relates to indigenous culture in Australia, the Pacific and the United States. Cachia received her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego in 2017. She is the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022) published by Routledge, that includes over 40 international contributors. She is currently working on two monographs: the first, entitled Contemporary Disability Art: Access Aesthetics and Institutional Critique, is under review, and the second is in development, entitled Hospitable Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability. In February 2023, Cachia was the Chair the Feminist Art Project Day of Panels, Art, Gender, and Disability: Aesthetics of Access, in collaboration with Rutgers University Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities for the College Art Association conference in New York, which consisted of 2 full days of in-person and virtual panels with disabled artists & scholars. This event was generously funded by a $50,000 Ford Foundation grant. Cachia is also the recipient of the International Association For Visual Culture 2022 Early Career Researcher Prize.
Cachia currently teaches art history, visual culture, and curatorial and exhibition studies at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, California State University Long Beach, California State University San Marcos and San Diego State University. She serves as caa.reviews Field Editor for West Coast Exhibitions (2023-2026), and has curated approximately 40 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. Her curatorial focus is representing the art and interests of disabled artists and producers. She has been invited as a consultant to museums around the world regarding how to make their content more accessible to disabled audiences within a curatorial lens, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada, Edvard Munch Museum in Norway, V-A-C Foundation in Russia, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.
Her critical writing has been published in eight edited volumes, numerous exhibition catalogues and art journals including Artforum, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Art Monthly Australia and On Curating, and peer-reviewed academic journals such as Art Journal, South Atlantic Quarterly, Design and Culture, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Museums and Social Issues, and The Senses and Society. She has also contributed an entry to Disability in American Life: An Encyclopedia of Concepts, Policies, and Controversies focusing on disability and contemporary art.
She has participated in numerous international and national conferences and related events within the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, and has guest lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase, Ontario College of Art and Design, Ryerson University, New York University, Goldsmiths College, Sydney College of the Arts, and Maryland Institute College of Art, among others. Cachia has served as a Visiting Critic for the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in NYC, and as a panelist for Creative Capital, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Leonardo CripTech Incubator, the Rubin Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Works grant and Canada Council for the Arts.