Biography

Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the tenure-track Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Masters of Arts in Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management, and the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Health. Cachia is the author of The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024) and the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors. She is the 2024 recipient of the $50,000 National Arts and Disability Award (Established) awarded by Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts). She is also a 2023 grantee of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and received the 2024 Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association to support the publication of her second monograph, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, forthcoming with Manchester University Press in September 2025. Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. Cachia previously taught 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.