Katherine Jentleson

Katherine “Katie” Jentleson, PhD, is Senior Curator of American Art and the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art. Since joining the High in 2015, she has curated ten exhibitions, including Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection, George Voronovsky: Memoryscapes in 2023, and Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe, which has toured the country from 2021 through 2025. Her exhibitions and publications have been awarded major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art Bridges Foundation, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has grown the High’s internationally renowned folk and self-taught art collection by more than six hundred objects, including major acquisitions of work by Voronovsky, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, the Gee’s Bend quilters, and Henry Church. In 2022, she began a three-year term as the Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Jentleson holds a B.A. from Cornell University and a PhD in art history from Duke University. In 2022 she began a three-year term as co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Before she became a curator, Dr. Jentleson worked as an arts journalist in New York. Through her editorial assignments and general experiences at galleries and museums there, she discovered her passion for self-taught artists and their historical legacy in the United States. In 2010, she began her graduate studies in art history at Duke University, where she focused her research on the rise of self-taught artists during the interwar period. During her graduate career she received awards and fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, and the Dedalus Foundation, and she contributed research and writing to exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, the Ackland Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Prospect.3 New Orleans. Dr. Jentleson adapted her dissertation into a peer-reviewed book Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America (University of California Press, Spring 2020) and the High Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition of the same name.