The Feminist Institute (TFI) documents and celebrates feminist contributions to culture by preserving and digitizing archival materials for public access. TFI promotes information activism and gender equity by infilling the cultural record to reflect fuller truths.

Through our partnership program, our staff works closely with institutions, feminist creators, and organizations on archival projects with both physical and digital records. We then provide access to digitized materials from these partnerships through the TFI Digital Archive. Our partnerships fuel our programs, including our digital exhibitions, events, Alive in the Archive video series, and blog.

We envision a future where gender-marginalized individuals and organizations’ equal contributions to culture are known and recognized, and their rights are protected.

Kathleen Landy founded The Feminist Institute in 2016 to make visible the invisible.

As a scholarship student at Villanova University, Landy wrote her senior thesis on feminist artists on the west coast through a close read of the correspondence between the instigators of the feminist art movement. She couldn’t access all of the necessary information for her research because it was housed in archives at various universities, and she didn’t have the funds to travel.

Feminist documentation, whether fine art, media, literature, or politics, does not live in a central digital repository. With the advent of new technology, Landy recognized the need to address educational inequities and make feminist primary source materials available online. When one’s work, voice, and story aren’t preserved and made accessible, they are forgotten, silenced, and made invisible.

Before founding TFI, Landy championed the work of women artists and cultural contributors, featuring many in the Liebman Magnan Gallery, which she co-owned and directed. Since launching The Feminist Institute, she has guest edited an edition of The Brooklyn Rail, spoken at the Feminists at Davos panel at The World Economic Forum, and spearheaded the 360-degree camera engagement of feminist artist studios with Google Arts and Culture.