Kathy Carbone

Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer, Department of Information Studies

Kathy Carbone is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also the director, co-founder, and archivist of The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action, a community-led, public participatory digital archive that documents, preserves, and shares art and activism related to displacement, border crossing, and refuge.

Prior to joining UCLA, she was the Institute Archivist and Performing Arts Librarian for over a decade at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a modern dancer and choreographer for more than 25 years.

Carbone’s research, teaching, and practice broadly focus on intersections between archives, contemporary art, and activism, and the role archives play in social relations and community building, meaning-making, individual and social memory, human rights, and liberatory work. 

Carbone holds a Ph.D. in Information Studies from UCLA, an MLIS from Kent State University, an MA in Dance and Music, and a BFA in Dance from Ohio University. 

Her research and scholarly interests include:

Publications

Carbone, Kathy, Anne J. Gilliland and María 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. “Introducing The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action.” Living Refugee Archive, 7 December 2020. 

Carbone, Kathy. “Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions.” Curator: The Museum Journal 63, 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. 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).Carbone, Kathy. “Jeannette A. Bastian.” In Encyclopedia of Archival Writers (1550-2015), edited by Luciana Duranti and Patricia C. Franks. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, (2019).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.