Sasha Archibald writes researched essays about art, histories of feeling, and cultural iconoclasts. Her writing has appeared in 4Columns, The New Yorker, Places Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, White Review, The Believer and in books published by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, PERFORMA, Walker Art Center, Whitechapel Gallery, and other institutions. She is currently writing a biography of the gay liberationist Carl Wittman (1943-1986).
Archibald is an associate editor at Places Journal and a contributing editor to The Public Domain Review. She worked for many years at Cabinet magazine, where she remains an editor-at-large.
She also teaches, and has taught and guest-lectured—on art criticism, critical studies, feminist art, and nonfiction craft—at the University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, Portland State University, Willamette University/Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Oklahoma State University. In 2021, she was co-instructor of the Summer Writing + Editorial Workshop of Places Journal.
Archibald’s background is non-profit arts administration. She was a freelance curator for many years, and held staff positions at Clockshop, Oakland Museum of California, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Visual AIDS, and the studio of artist Fred Wilson. She was a mentee in the Andy Warhol Arts Writing Workshop with critic Holland Cotter, and a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Raised in small-town Oregon, she attended Lewis & Clark College and New York University, and now lives in Portland.
︎homepage wallpaper is a celestial-design wallpaper, maker unknown, ca. 1880; from the collection of Historic New England