Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Jonathan D. Katz was co-curator with David Ward of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first queer exhibition ever mounted at a major US museum, which opened at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2010, then traveled to the Brooklyn Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum. Hide/Seek received the 2011 Best National Museum Exhibit award from the US section of the International Association of Art Critics and a Stonewall Award from the American Library Association for its accompanying book. He directs the doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo and is presently completing a new book, The Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Cold War, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. His next major exhibition, entitled ArtAIDSAmerica, will travel to four museums nationally in 2015-16, funded in part by a Warhol Foundation grant. Previously, Katz was a Terra Foundation Senior Fellow at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. As an associate professor at Yale University (2002-06), he was founding director of its Lesbian and Gay Studies Program, the first in the Ivy League. A pioneering scholar, in 1990, he was the first full-time American academic to be tenured in the field of gay and lesbian studies at City College of San Francisco and founded and chaired both the Harvey Milk Institute, then the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association. He also co-founded Queer Nation, San Francisco, and the Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, the organization that successfully lobbied for queer anti-discrimination statutes in the city of Chicago. He is the president and chief curator of the new Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City.