Amanda Cachia
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 Professor of Practice in Museum Studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Cachia is the author of Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (forthcoming 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. Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. Cachia has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. She 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 the University of Houston, 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.
Education
Ph.D. Art History, Theory & Criticism, University of California San Diego, 2017
M.A. Visual & Critical Studies, California College of the Arts, 2012
M.A. Curatorial Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2001
Expertise Areas
Area of study
Research Interests
Contemporary disability art and politics, crip curatorial studies, access aesthetics, social justice
Publications
Books:
Amanda Cachia, Rehabilitating the Asylum: Mental Health Justice and Contemporary Art, Manchester: UK: Manchester University Press (under advance contract).
Amanda Cachia, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2025. (Recipient of Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2023 and College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund).
Amanda Cachia, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2024.
Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation, edited by Amanda Cachia, London: Routledge, 2022.
Recent Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:
Amanda Cachia, “A Firm Infirmity: Extending Rebecca Horn’s Aesthetic Prosthetics to Disability Studies,” Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2025, Vol. 46, Issue 1.
Amanda Cachia, “Constructing Elastic Worlds: From Avant-Garde Exhibition Design to Crip Comfort.” Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2024.
Journal of Arts & Communities, Vol. 15, Issue 2, October 2024, published online: February 2025, Special Issue: “Transdisciplinarity in Disability, Art and Design," Guest edited by Amanda Cachia.
Amanda Cachia (2024). “Crafting Disability: Re-envisioning Indian Textile Traditions.” The Journal of Modern Craft, 17(2), 109–123.
Amanda Cachia, “Crip Curation and the Aesthetics of the Undeliverable,” Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2023.
Book Chapters:
Amanda Cachia, “Disability Studies: Institutional Critique and Disability Art as an Heir to Art’s History,” Art History Now: Objects, Concepts, Approaches, edited by Geraldine Johnson, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: New York and London, 2026.
Amanda Cachia, “Moving towards touch: the ambulatory aesthetics of description” in Beyond the Visual: Multisensory modes of beholding art, edited by Ken Wilder and Aaron McPeake, London: UCL Press, 2025.
Amanda Cachia, “Cripistemology of the Cabinet: Jesse Darling’s Epistemologies (shamed cabinet),” in Art and the Critical Medical Humanities (Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities), edited by Fiona Johnstone, Stuart Murray, and Allison Morehead, London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic Press, December 2025.
Amanda Cachia, “Fugitive Crip Way-Finding and Artful Deception in the Museum,” in Pedagogical Art in Activist and Curatorial Practices, edited by Izabel Galliera and Noni Brynjolson, London and New York: Routledge, 2025.
Amanda Cachia, “Curating New Perspectives: How My Dwarfism Led Me to Disability Arts,” in Erin Pritchard (ed.) Dwarfism Arts and Advocacy: Creating Our Own Positive Identity, Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2024.
Amanda Cachia, “Reinvention at the Wheel: Shaping New Histories in the Decolonization of Disability” in The Routlege Companion to Decolonizing Art History, edited by Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, New York and London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2023.
Amanda Cachia, “Art History’s Co-Inhabitants: Disabled Artistic Approaches to Indigeneity” in Routledge Companion to Art and Disability edited by Keri Watson and Timothy W. Hiles, London and New York: Routledge, 2022.