Kathy Barrie

Kathy Barrie has spent her career where museums, public art and civic life meet. She began in education and exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art, then became the founding executive director of Cleveland Public Art, the city's public art and civic discourse organization, now LAND Studio.

With Dennis Barrie, founding executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she leads Barrie Projects, which plans museums and cultural projects on unexpected subjects. She led content development, curatorial direction and design for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, and Barrie Projects worked on the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs from its 2013 feasibility study to its opening in 2020. In Cleveland the firm produced the Catalog of Ideas: A Vision for Uptown. Kathy also heads Case Western Reserve University's Putnam Art Collection, and in 2024 she gave the university's Richard N. Campen Lecture in Architecture and Sculpture.