Katie McGowan, Director
[email protected]; she/her, they/them
Katie Grace McGowan is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and committed advocate for creative workers. In 2011, following a decade of working as an artist, entrepreneur, and college lecturer in several U.S. locations and in Croatia, Katie returned to her hometown to collaboratively build the Department of Education and Public Engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). In this position she co-founded the museum’s DEPE Space Residency program and helped launch and program the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead (a sculptural edifice on the museum’s grounds), in addition to designing and implementing educational public programming and creative activations at the museum. Subsequently she ran an art consulting firm between NYC and Detroit and served as program director for the Ann Arbor Film Festival—the oldest experimental and avant-garde film festival in North America.
Earlier in her career, Katie taught visual language and culture and English courses at The Art Institute of California San Diego, Intermedia at The University of Iowa, performance and installation at the College for Creative Studies and The Essay as Form—a graduate seminar while serving as sabbatical cover—at Eastern Michigan University. She has guest lectured at The Academy of Applied Arts Rijeka and the Arts Academy of the University of Split (both in Croatia), Western University (London, Ontario), and Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN).
Katie’s creative work straddles literary art—autofiction and experimental poetry, in particular—and performance art. Her practice is rooted in participatory observation, or what she calls invisible theater, through which she explores ideologies different from her own via participatory observation.
Katie’s performative and literary work has been presented at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI), Provisions Library at George Mason University (Washington D.C.), GALERIE8 (London, UK), The Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR), Galerija Kortil (Rijeka, Croatia), and Detroit Artists Market and N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art (Detroit, MI), among others. Her residency history includes Craft Advanced Research Projects Agency|CARPA, (Joshua Tree, CA); Udruga Filmaktiv (Rijeka, Croatia); and Prostor Plus (Rijeka, Croatia). She holds an MFA from The University of Iowa in Intermedia as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees from Wayne State University, in English. Katie has served on the board of directors of Detroit Puppet Company since 2016.
