Kathleen Stewart Howe

Kathleen Howe specializes in photography in the 19th century as a tool for exploration, primarily in the Middle East and Far East and in the then burgeoning sciences of archaeology, anthropology and geography. She curated First Seen: Photographs of the World’s Peoples for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the exhibit also showed at the Dahesh Museum in New York City and at the University of New Mexico. Another related exhibit that Howe co-curated with Karen Sinsheimer, Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine, also showed at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1997 and traveled to venues in the United States and Australia. She served as the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the
Pomona College Museum of Art from 2004 -2019.

Howe is a prolific author whose books include First Seen: Portraits of the World’s Peoples (2004), The Social Lens: Photographs from the Ray Graham Collection (2003), Excursions Along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt (1994), Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (1997) and Felix Teynard: Calotypes of Egypt, a Catalogue Raisonne (1992), the latter a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in Photography. She has also authored numerous essays and academic papers and lectured at museums throughout the United States and Canada.