Dr. Megan Kincaid is an art historian and curator based in New York. Her research and teaching advance new models for rethinking modernism’s disciplinary perimeters and historiography, particularly by reconstructing transnational episodes and the dynamics of cultural contact between the Americas and Europe. A related interest centers alternate accounts of modernist abstraction’s development alongside discourses of extranationality, exile, and liberatory possibility. Studying mobility, migration, and network formation, Kincaid’s present scholarship suggests a revolutionary theory of abstraction, devised by artists in asylum in Mexico City during World War II, gave visual expression to shifting notions of place, land, and identity structured by the period’s land-based dispossession, statelessness, and cultural nationalism.

Previously, Kincaid taught on modern art and dance history at NYU. Her scholarship has been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the NYU Center for the Humanities and published by journals including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, as well as monographs and volumes for university presses, museums, and galleries. In the public forum, she regularly contributes art criticism to Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail and has been invited to lecture at institutions such as the Americas Society, Barnard College, The Courtauld Institute of Art, The Frick Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her curatorial practice includes exhibitions of Chicane muralism in Los Angeles, José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Fanny Sanín, Cauleen Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, and more. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript entitled Unrooting Modernist Abstraction: Transnationalism, Landscape, and Revolution in the Art of the 1940s, as well as forthcoming articles and interviews with contemporary artists. Kincaid received a PhD from The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU (2024) and BA in Art History from Columbia University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa (2017).