Specialization:
Areas of Concentration: Modern and Contemporary Art and Craft of the United States; Feminist Art History
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Jenni Sorkin
Bio:
Amanda Malmstrom is a first-year graduate student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. Her research centers the artistic, activist, and craft labor of women in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Malmstrom was previously Associate Curator at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, where she worked for over 8 years on the museum’s exhibitions, publications, and collections. She co-curated of the 2025 exhibition, Emily Cole: Ceramics, Flora, and Contemporary Responses, and the nationally-traveling 2023-24 exhibition, Women Reframe American Landscape, and co-edited and contributed essays to both exhibitions’ catalogues. In 2024, Malmstrom authored The Art of Emily Cole, the first book devoted to the 19th-century china painter. Malmstrom received her B.A. in History and Art History from Loyola University Chicago, where she received multiple grants and awards for her original research on the women artists of The Catholic Worker newspaper and the Chicago feminist artists’ collective, The SisterSerpents.