Natalie Callahan

Natalie Callahan graduated from Chatham University in 2023 with a degree in arts management and a degree in international studies.  She also has a certificate in women’s leadership from

the university.  Natalie is particularly interested in matters of arts accessibility and community engagement in the arts.  She loves to work with members of the public, especially in ways that help to excite them about the arts and encourage them to feel as though they are a part of the artistic community.  She has explored many ways to increase arts exposure that go beyond traditional arts institutions.  As the arts editor of her university’s literary magazine, she experimented with the idea of free, printed art through her curation of artists’ work in the magazine.  She also explored how other media such as posters and stickers interacted with the university’s micro community.  Besides, Natalie co-founded a fashion club on campus, framing fashion as the ultimate form of accessible art because, after all, everybody wears clothes.  The fashion club offered affordable ways to create wearable items, funded trips to fashion history exhibitions, and contributed to the success of a campus-wide Sustainable Fashion Fair clothing swap.  Following her graduation, Natalie worked at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, an arts nonprofit of the city.  Here, she was able to engage in the many different glass art-making processes (including blown glass, flameworked glass, and fused glass) while helping the center carry out its mission of public access education and community building.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Natalie is creating a body of work emphasizing the beauty of the physical labor and skill involved in the Banarasi weaving process and, by extension, in art-making in general.  She is creating a series of graphite drawings and complementary sketches illustrating the physical components of the weaving process.  By calling attention to the beauty of the labor involved both in her own artistic processes and in the processes of the weavers, her project is a departure from the arguable inaccessibility of contemporary art due to the intellectual aura associated with it.