Kathy Carbone

Kathy Carbone is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information, where she teaches Foundations of Information and Management of Archives and Special Collections. She is also the co-founder, director, and archivist of The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action.

Carbone’s research and practice sit at the nexus of contemporary art and archives, focusing on critical-creative-liberatory archival interventions, participatory cultural heritage, and utilizing archives as tactics and tools for acts of expressive resistance, community building, and social engagement. Her publications appear in Archivaria, Archives and Records, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, The International Journal of Human Rights, Curator: The Museum Journal, Archival Science, Journal of Documentation, and Defining a Discipline: Archival Research and Practice in the 21st Century (SAA, 2020).

She previously taught at UCLA, CalArts, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and was a scholar on the UCLA/Queens College Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Initiative for several years. She was the CalArts Institute Archivist and Performing Arts Librarian for over a decade, the director and librarian of the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center Library (Kigali, Rwanda), and the Public Services/ Outreach Manager of the Willoughby-Eastlake Public Library System.

A modern dancer and choreographer, Carbone danced professionally with Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Victoria Uris, Susan Van Pelt, and Susan Hadley. For over two decades, she choreographed works and collaborated with musicians, dancers, and visual artists through improvisation and set material in theater and gallery-based live performance events in San Francisco, San Diego, Cleveland, Sewanee, Columbus, and Mexicali.

• Ph.D., Information Studies, UCLA
• MLIS, Kent State University
• MA, Dance and Music, Ohio University
• BFA, Dance, Ohio University

Carbone, Kathy, Anne J. Gilliland, and Maria Montenegro. “Rights in and to Records and Recordkeeping: Fighting Bureaucratic Violence through a Human Rights-Centered Approach to the Creation, Management and Dissemination of Documentation,” Education for Information: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies 37, no.1 (2021): 3-26.

Carbone, Kathy. “Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3 (2020): 1-24.

Carbone, Kathy. “Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions,” Curator: The Museum Journal 62, no.2 (2020): 257-263. 

Carbone, Kathy. “A Collection and its Many Relations and Contexts: Constructing an Object Biography of the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files,” Journal of Documentation 76, no.3 (2020): 753-767.

Gilliland, Anne J., and Kathy Carbone. “An Analysis of Warrant for Rights in Records for Refugees,” The International Journal of Human Rights 24, no.4 (2020): 483-508.

Gilliland, Anne J., and Kathy Carbone. “Movement and Transformation: Teaching to the Fourth Dimension,” in Defining a Discipline: Archival Research and Practice in the 21st Century, edited by Elizabeth Yakel and Jeannette Bastian, 125-143. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2020.

Carbone, Kathy. “Surveillance to Art: ‘Flipping Around the Paranoia,’” in “Information/Control: Control in the Age of Post-Truth,” eds. James Lowry, Stacy E. Wood, and Andrew J. Lau. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no.2  (2019): 1-16.

Carbone, Kathy Michelle. “Artists and Records: Moving History and Memory,” Archives and Records 38, no. 1 (2017): 100-118.

Carbone, Kathy. “Artists in the Archive: An Exploratory Study of the Artist-in-Residence Program at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center,” Archivaria 79 (Spring 2015): 27-52.

Wood, Stacy, Kathy Carbone, Marika Cifor, Anne Gilliland, and Ricardo Punzalan. “Mobilizing Records: Re-framing Archival Description to Support Human Rights,” Archival Science 14 (2014): 397-419.