Amanda Cachia (Ph.D., University of California San Diego, 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, where she also serves as Affiliate Faculty in the Disability Studies B.A. program. She is Program Head of the ASU–LACMA Fellowship M.A. in Art History, funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Cachia is an internationally recognized scholar, curator, and writer whose work advances disability art history, theory, and activism; crip curatorial practices and access aesthetics; museum studies and institutional critique; social justice; and critical disability approaches to translation, movement, medicine, and health. She is the author of three books: Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2027), Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (Manchester University Press, 2025), and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (Temple University Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for the College Art Association’s 2026 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is also the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (Routledge, 2022), a volume featuring more than forty international contributors. Her fourth book, Disability Art: A Political History, scheduled for 2028, is under contract with Yale University Press.
As Founding Editor of the Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access series at Manchester University Press, co-edited with Lisa Slominski, Cachia has established a major platform for scholarship that challenges the ableist foundations of art history and positions disability as a transformative force in visual culture, curatorial practice, and the politics of access.
A prolific scholar, Cachia’s writing has appeared in twenty edited collections and numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Curatorial Studies; Woman’s Art Journal; Journal of Modern Craft; Senses & Society; Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; Disability Studies Quarterly; and Museums and Social Issues. Her work is also forthcoming in American Art, the journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, TDR: The Drama Review and Performance Research, and under review at Third Text and Critical Inquiry. Her article, “Crip Curation and the Aesthetics of the Undeliverable,” published in the Journal of Visual Culture, received the International Association for Visual Culture’s Early Career Research Prize in 2022. She has guest edited special issues of Art Journal (2017), “Curating New Openings: Re-thinking Diversity in the Museum,” and the Journal of Arts and Communities (2024), “Transdisciplinarity in Disability, Art, and Design.” Her scholarship has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian.
Cachia is currently Research and Curatorial Advisor for a major exhibition on art and disability from the nineteenth century to the present, scheduled for 2028 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), for which she will also serve as contributing author to the accompanying publication. Concurrently, she is curating The Material Alchemy of Disability at Tierra del Sol Gallery in West Hollywood. Since 2010, she has organized twenty exhibitions dedicated to the work of disabled artists. Her 2024 exhibition Smoke & Mirrors at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University was supported by a $180,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. From 2023 to 2024, she served as curatorial consultant and commissioned essayist for For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, Disability, part of the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute’s PST ART initiative at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Her major touring exhibition, Vital Signs: From Patient to Power, is currently in development with Mid-America Arts Alliance and ExhibitsUSA and will travel to venues across the United States from 2027 to 2032.
Her research, writing, and curatorial projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Among her honors are 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).