Faculty & Staff

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Kathy O'Dell
Associate Professor
Art History
Associate Dean
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

410-455-2840 PHY 328
odell@umbc.edu

Dr. Kathy O’Dell is an art critic and historian of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on performance art. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Lusitania, Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, and she is cofounder and former editor of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts, for which she chief-edited an issue titled Hysteria in 2000. She curated Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years at UMBC in 1997; the exhibition traveled to the Hunter Art Gallery (N.Y.). Author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), O’Dell is currently coauthoring with Kristine Stiles a major survey book titled World Art Since 1945 (Laurence King Publishers, 2011). O’Dell has lectured at national and international institutions, including the Getty Research Institute (L.A.), Guggenheim Museum of Art (N.Y.), Royal Danish Academy of Art (Copenhagen), Danish Design School (Copenhagen), Mt. Allison University (Canada), Manchester University (U.K.), and John Hansard Gallery (U.K.).

Since 2001, O’Dell has been Associate Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UMBC. Her portfolio includes P-20 issues, arts education initiatives, conflict mediation, and women’s leadership. She serves on the Fine Arts Education Advisory Panel of the Maryland State Department of Education, and the AEMS Alliance’s Higher Education in the Arts Task Force. She is also on the Board of Trustees of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, and she serves as a vice president of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

Dr. O’Dell holds degrees in art history from Colby College (B.A.), the University of California, Berkeley (M.A.), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (Ph.D.).