Kathleen Forde

For more than twenty years, Kathleen Forde’s career as a time-based arts curator has encompassed the spheres of exhibition, performance, and technology. In addition to her work rooted in exhibition curation, she has a specific focus on projects in which she works with artists on ambitious new commissions. She has worked both independently and on staff with numerous institutions including Superblue, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Shed (NYC), Borusan Contemporary (Istanbul), the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center—EMPAC (Troy, NY), the Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Audemars Piguet, Telefonica (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As an independent curator and consultant, Kathleen concurrently holds the titles of Senior Curator for Superblue and Senior Advisor & Curator-at-Large for the Thoma Foundation's Digital & Media Arts collection.

Previously, Forde was the Artistic Director at Large for Borusan Contemporary, a collection-based space for media arts exhibitions, commissions, and public programming in Istanbul. During her tenure at BC she curated and toured numerous solo exhibitions by artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Carsten Nicolai, Diana Thater, Bill Viola and John Gerrard, and collaborated with curators and institutions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Espacio Telefonica Madrid, La Boral Gijon, and the Kunsthalle Darmstadt.

From 2005 to 2012 Forde was the Curator of Time-Based Visual Arts at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. At EMPAC she commissioned and/or produced a broad range of new work by artists that included The Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, Japanther, Jem Cohen, and Ben Rubin, and curated exhibitions such as Dancing on the Ceiling: Art and Zero Gravity.

Prior to EMPAC, Forde was the Curatorial Director for Live Arts and New Media at the Goethe Institut Internaciones in Berlin and Munich. As Curatorial Associate and then Assistant Curator for Media Arts at SFMOMA (1999–2002), she co-curated the interdisciplinary show 010101: Art in Technological Times in addition to ongoing work with both temporary and permanent collection exhibitions.

She is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in the MA Curatorial Practice program. In 2010 Forde was a fellow in the 2010 Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) fellowship class and held an Alexander von Humboldt research scholarship in Berlin from 2002–2003. She earned an MA in Post-1945 Art and Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London.