Catharina Manchanda 
joined the Seattle Art Museum in 2011 as Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art. A native of Germany, she received her Ph.D. at the City University Graduate Center in New York specializing in German conceptual photography of the 1960s and ‘70s. While in New York she helped organize a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. At the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis she curated Beauty and the Blonde: An Exploration of American Art and Popular Culture with work from the 1960s to the present, and Models and Prototypes, which investigated the prevalence of architectural and conceptual models as templates for artistic production. Prior to her move to Seattle she worked as Senior Curator at the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art where she organized exhibitions on Robin Rhode and Cyprien Gaillard. For SAM, she is currently curating a series of exhibitions and installations for Elles: SAM, including a focused show on Yayoi Kusama, a presentation of paintings by Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, conceptual works by Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper, and accompanying video program. Her published writings address a range of topics from photography and conceptual art, to essays on individual artists such as Gerhard Richter, Thomas Demand, Braco Dimitrijevic, Robin Rhode, Cyprien Gaillard and George Grosz.