Lauren Kroiz is an art historian, author, and curator whose work examines the complex intersections of art, modernism, and political action in the twentieth-century United States. She currently serves as an Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her interdisciplinary research shapes discourses on race, gender, representation, and aesthetics. She has taught a range of topics in the history of art made in and in relation to the United States, including courses on avant-gardism, race and representation, thing theory, technologies of imaging, and meanings of medium. Currently, Kroiz is interested in historicism, artistic revivals, and non-simultaneity, as well as the relation of photography, performance, and ephemerality. She welcomes applications from graduate students interested in these subjects and others in the history of modern and twentieth-century art.
A recognized institutional leader, Kroiz was formerly the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (2020-2022) and continues to serve as Faculty Curator of photography, paintings, and works of art on paper. In these capacities, as well as in work with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and other institutions, she has leveraged her understanding of the historical impact of collecting and archiving to champion critical, object-based research and inclusive curatorial practices. Kroiz also holds affiliate faculty positions with the American Studies Program and the Center for Race and Gender.
Kroiz is the author of three award-winning books published by the University of California Press. Her third book, Living Power: Women's Suffrage and Modern American Art (2026), explores the modernist aesthetics of the American women's suffrage movement and traces the history of feminist art through a critical, intersectional lens. Her previous monographs include Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (2018), which explores the links between regionalist art education and democratic identity, and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle(2012), which won the Phillips Collection Book Prize for its innovative reevaluation of early American modernism.
Beyond her books, Kroiz is an essayist and public scholar. Her articles—ranging from the aesthetics of the Hoover Dam to investigations into the history of American art pedagogy and disciplinary reform—have been published in anthologies and leading journals, including American Art, Archives of American Art, Boom: A Journal of California,Middle West Review, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Oxford Art Journal,Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, The Journal of Architecture. Her writing has been included in museum catalogs, including the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Ashmolean Museum, BAMPFA, Museum of Modern Art, and the Phillips Collection.
Kroiz’s recent work has been supported at Berkeley by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and a Chancellor’s Public Scholars Faculty Fellowship, as well as by the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award, the College Art Association's Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, the Midwestern History Association’s Jon Gjerde Book Prize, the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Visiting Professorship at Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Kroiz served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Phillips Collection’s Center for the Study of Modern Art, and a Visiting Professor at Bowdoin College. Kroiz received her Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her B.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago.