[email protected]
Phone: (301) 637-4437

Kayla Conklin (she/her) is the Arts for the Aging Program and Communications Coordinator. She is a part of the programs team and leads the Creative Connections Project, social media accounts, and special exhibitions. She has worked in the field of arts, non-profits, and museums for five years and has explored collections management, museum education, arts programming, and curation during that time. Kayla’s recently completed master’s thesis is entitled, “Buried Alive: Andrea Bowers’s Still Life of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Storage” and is available at the American University Library. She earned a master’s degree in art history with a specialization in contemporary American art at American University and a bachelor’s degree in art history and anthropology at the University of Maryland. Kayla is a published author on the topics of contemporary American art and queer artistic activism. The American University Museum published two exhibition catalog essays by Kayla in 2023, “Anne Truitt’s Summer Snow in Dynamic Stasis” and “Practicing Queer Formalism: The Covert Intimacy of Lillian Klein Abensohn’s A Crowd of Spring.” Kayla’s enthusiasm for the arts began with trips to the Hirshhorn Museum with her dad in elementary school where she encountered the work of Ai Weiwei and Robert Gober and discovered art’s political and activist potential. Since these early museum visits, she began believing in the transformative power of the arts to assemble communities of care, and now, sees Arts for the Aging as proof of this. She loves practicing yoga and crocheting her loved ones gifts.