On research leave for the 2025-2026 academic year

Katie Anania specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on queer and feminist theory, the environmental humanities, and histories of knowledge. Her first book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America (Yale, 2024), 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” art form during a period marked by increasing anxieties about waste, consumer culture, and the rapidly deteriorating natural world. She co-edited a book of essays, Early Modern Imaginaries: Critical Debates on the Usable Past in the Long Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, forthcoming 2026), with Andrew Leach and Robert Brennan that expanded on this work.

Her third book project, Devour Everything: Feminist Art After Agriculture, for which she will be a Research Scholar at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music in 2025-2026, traces queer and feminist art projects in the Americas that sought to repair environmental imbalances by remaking land. Starting with coalitional ecological movements in California and Puerto Rico in the 1960s, this history traces multi-sensory methods – including healing ceremonies, feminist farms, pop-up clinics, and modes of musical protest – that queer and feminist artists employed to re-ground human bodies in their local contexts and connect with their ancestors.  

Dr. Anania is interested in the ways that art’s histories have impacted scientific and computational thinking. At UNL, she directs Generative Lineages across Art, Data, and Environment/s (GLADE/s), an interdisciplinary consortium that uses art and design history to consider colonial histories of water use and resource extraction.