Amanda Cachia is a cultural historian of disability and the visual arts, an art historian, and a curator. She is Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at Arizona State University, where she is also Program Head of the ASU–LACMA Fellowship M.A. in Art History, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies. Her research areas are disability history and disability studies; modern and contemporary cultural history and visual culture of the United States and the Americas in a transnational context; art and the history of medicine; feminist art history; and museums, exhibitions, and the public humanities. Cachia is the author of The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (Temple University Press, 2024), winner of the Dedalus Foundation’s 2026 Robert Motherwell First Book Award and shortlisted for the College Art Association’s 2026 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Association for the Study of Art of the Present (ASAP) 2026 Book Award; Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (Manchester University Press, 2025), shortlisted for the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2026 Charles C. Eldredge Book Award; and Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2027). Her fourth monograph, Disability Art: A Political History, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2028. It traces the Disability Arts movement from its roots in disability rights activism across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
Her current book project, Crip Modernism: Disabled Women and the History of Modern Art, shows how disability revises established histories of modernism. It places illness, impairment, medicalization, and institutionalization in relation to questions of gender, nation, labor, materiality, and artistic production. Research from the project includes work on Frida Kahlo under review at Third Text. Her recent and forthcoming articles reconsider hysteria, Minimalism, prosthetic aesthetics, and postwar art through disability and feminist methods. They appear or are forthcoming in American Art (special issue “Disabilities and American Art Histories”), TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, Woman’s Art Journal, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies. She is the author of the “Disability Arts” entry for Grove Art Online and a contributor to the edited volume, Art History Now: Objects, Concepts, Approaches (2026). Cachia’s scholarship is closely tied to her work in the public humanities. She is Research and Curatorial Advisor for Gain: Art and Disability from 1838 to Now which will be presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028, and held the same role for For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, Disability (2024-2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, funded by the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute’s PST ART initiative. She has curated approximately 50 exhibitions since 2001, including Smoke and Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, supported by a $180,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, and Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, Performance at the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, supported by a $178,000 Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter grant.
She has also built new programs linking universities, museums, and the health humanities. In 2027 she will launch the pilot year of Rehabilitating the Museum: A Curatorial Pathway in Art and Mental Health, a research, teaching, and curatorial initiative at Arizona State University supported by $80,000 from a major national philanthropic foundation. The initiative creates a pathway for emerging curators to take up questions of mental health justice through paid museum internships, public lectures, graduate teaching, and collaborative programming. She is Series Founding Editor, with Lisa Slominski, of Critical Studies in Art, Disability and Access (Manchester University Press, 2026–) and the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (Routledge, 2022). Cachia’s work has been supported by the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Grant, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Creative Australia National Art and Disability Award, among others. She received her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego.