Dr. Kathryn Barush is a Professor of Art History and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. She is the founding director of the Berkeley Arts and Interreligious Pilgrimage Project and has held positions at the National Gallery of Art (CASVA) and the Yale Center for British Art after receiving a D.Phil. from Oxford University in 2012. A prolific and award-winning author, Dr. Barush’s most recent book, Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (2021), has been praised as being ‘well-written, creatively constructed, and accessible’ and for its multidisciplinary approach engaging ‘material religion, multiculturalism, history, pluralism, dialogical encounter, spiritual expression, disability, illness, dying, visual arts, and music.’ It was the recipient of the 2022 Art & Religion Book Prize through the American Academy of Religion and the Borsch-Rast Prize and Lectureship. She has also published a full-length study of art and the sacred journey in Britain from 1790-1850 which was one of Marina Warner's selections for Book of the year in TLS, along with articles in venues from the Brooklyn Rail to the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. She is currently working (with Rachel Smith) on a co-edited anthology of essays which consider contemporary art as a pilgrimage and/or site through a diversity of perspectives, as well as a project connecting the major arcana of the tarot to medieval and contemporary pilgrimage narratives, arguing that the cards have long functioned as performing objects, situating the reader/viewer as a pilgrim negotiating an interactive journey through text and image. Links to some of her current work and projects can be found here.