Kathy O'Dell is known for art theories, especially for contextualizing violence in performance art within social contracts and psychoanalytic theories.
11 Facts About Kathy O'Dell
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Kathy O'Dell's dissertation was titled, Toward a theory of performance art: an investigation of its sites.
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Kathy O'Dell held adjunct and visiting positions at School of Visual Arts, Adelphi University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Kathy O'Dell joined the faculty of the Visual Arts department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1992.
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From 2001 to 2014, Kathy O'Dell served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
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Kathy O'Dell became Special Assistant to the Dean for Education and Arts Partnerships in 2014.
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Kathy O'Dell is a co-founder and editor of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts in Baltimore and the World.
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In 1998, Kathy O'Dell published Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s, in which she posited that the growth of masochistic performance during the 1970s may be understood in context of societal responses to the Vietnam War and corresponding changes in social contract theories.
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Kathy O'Dell argues that we need to move beyond the fact of pain and examine the ways in which these artists' masochistic strategies push the limits of an implicit contract between the performer and audience.
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Kelly wrote that Kathy O'Dell has made the first detailed study of heterogeneous, elusive movements of the 1970s, exposing gender bias of art criticism and introducing new critical apparatus to assess ephemeral art forms.
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Kathy O'Dell produced "a praiseworthy catalog with an essay by Millett as well as Kathy O'Dell's own clear and thorough essay on Millett's work", including a video interview with Millett.