Kaila T. Schedeen, PhD (she/her/hers) is an arts administrator, curator and writer based in Austin, TX. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2023, where she also received her undergraduate degree with Special Honors in 2014. Kaila completed her MA in Art History at the University of Delaware in 2016.

Kaila specializes in contemporary American art with a particular focus on artists who critically examine the terms of identity, belonging, and nationhood in the United States through photography, performance, and multimedia works. Her dissertation considers how the artists Tseng Kwong Chi, Carrie Mae Weems, and Will Wilson have used photography to engage—and ultimately reject—narratives of U.S. national identity as they are attached to landscape representations and ideologies. Her research interests include the history of photography, critical race theory, whiteness studies, affect theory, performativity, ecology/ecocriticism, futurity, and representations of the American West.

Kaila is currently the Exhibitions and Collections Manager at Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin (UT). She has previously held positions at the Harry Ransom Center, UT; the Visual Arts Center, UT; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma; John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, UT; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; and Mechanical Hall Gallery at the University of Delaware. She is a co-founding member of the curatorial-focused Neon Queen Collective, which investigates topics such as race, ethnicity, representation, class, sexuality, and gender in socially engaged art produced by feminist artists of color.