Katie Anania specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on environmental art history, feminism, and queer theory. Widely published on twentieth-century drawing, she is interested in the ways that artists and designers center their works’ material properties: by leveraging cheap materials such as paper and cardboard, for instance, or using soil, blood, disposable packaging, or edible matter. Her current book project, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, examines the shifting position of drawing in American studio practice in the long 1960s. By investigating paper as a dynamic material matrix that could connect the body with its surrounding ecosystem, Out of Paper shows how artists manipulated this “minor” and historically intimate art form during a period marked by increasing anxieties about identity, consumer culture, and the rapidly deteriorating natural world. This project has been supported by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Getty Research Institute, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. She is currently a Faculty Fellow at UNL’s Daugherty Water for Food Institute, which co-sponsored her 2021 exhibition The Nature of Waste: Material Pathways, Discarded Worlds at the Sheldon Museum of Art.

Her second book project, for which she will be in residence as a Tyson Scholar of American Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022, traces the use of food as a material in hemispheric feminist artworks of the 1970s. She also writes about art and design for Artforum, Slate, and The Brooklyn Rail. In 2014 she co-founded the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco dedicated to supporting artworks critical of gentrification. Before coming to UNL she was a Wallace Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Drawing Institute at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.