Kat Caribeaux (she/her) is a researcher, writer, and generalist maker whose academic work concerns the confluences of environmental justice, arts advocacy, and placemaking. She earned her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University, where her dissertation took up the material histories of taxidermy dioramas to better understand today’s Anthropocene visuality. Attending to interwoven legacies of settler colonial domination towards a sense of ecological solidarity, she argues for the centrality of abolitionist frameworks to the environmental justice movement.
While completing her PhD, she worked as a specimen preparator and taxidermy apprentice at the Bird Division of the Field Museum of Natural History. Simultaneously, she served as an Innovator in Residence at the Northwestern University Emerging Technologies Lab, and founded the university’s born-digital environmental humanities journal, Lime. She has previously worked in curatorial, educational, archival, and collections capacities across institutions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB5 2023); the Harvard Fine Arts Library; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.