Kathleen Stewart Howe joined Pomona College in 2004 as the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Pomona College Art Museum and Professor of Art History. She received her Ph.D. in Art History (history of photography) University of New Mexico.
Howe is the recipient of multiple grants from: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Planning grant to develop museum curricular collaborations); Getty Foundation (multiple grants under the Pacific Standard Time Initiatives); NEA and NEH; and the Kress Foundation. She was a Chester Dale Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. She is a Peer reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums, with an emphasis on academic museums.
Trained as a curator, Dr. Howe is the curator of exhibitions and author of catalogues focused on the interplay of photography and culture. Her projects include most recently in that area, In Search of Biblical Lands: 19th century Photography in the Holy Land, a 2011 exhibition at the Getty Villa. And she has curated over 100 exhibitions. At Pomona College her focus has been on recent art and its complementarities to the arts of the past. This includes exhibitions featuring artists John Divola, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Michalek, James Turrell, Frederick Hammersley, Kara Walker, and Enrique Chagoya, and Francisco Goya.
She is the author of Excursions Along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt, winner of a Krazna Kraus Foundation Award; and Felix Teynard: Calotypes of Egypt (a New York Times Notable Book in Photography). She has contributed to or edited books on the role of photography in archaeology in the New World, the connections between photography and the graphic arts, contemporary photographs of the Great Plains, and contemporary Native American art, as well as numerous essays for monographs in photography.
She has led the opening of the new museum facility for the Pomona College Museum of Art.
GLI Peer Mentor (2016)