Welcome to The Feminist Institute!

Newly established in 2017, The Feminist Institute is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to digitizing and sharing the rich history of feminist contributions to art, the humanities, politics, and business, and making our archive accessible online — for free.

We have accomplished some great things since our launch, including:

• Digital capturing the contents of artist Mary Beth Edelson’s SoHo loft with 360-degree views.

• Curating an online exhibition on Cindy Sherman.

• Recording 360-degree views of Judith Bernstein’s Studio.

• Guest-editing the March 2019 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.

• Partnering with The Female Quotient on The Feminist Portfolio, an art project depicting historic feminist figures.

• We’ve been working with several partners behind-the-scenes to best serve our community and to fulfill our mission.

Our mission at The Feminist Institute is to capitalize on the mass dissemination that online search and technology offers us to advance the march of feminism: to make visible the invisible, to achieve greater equalization through digitization. To that goal, we are developing a new database that will appropriately highlight, preserve, and steward digitized and born-digital materials from notable feminists from all spheres.

While we develop our database, we will provide:

• Tutorials on personal digital archiving best practices, from choosing the proper file formats to long-term maintenance.

• Introductions to a variety of archival theories and techniques to better contextualize The Feminist Institute’s work.

• Features on important projects being completed by archivists around the country, particularly those that work within feminist ethics of care or ethical digital preservation access.

• Interviews with notable feminists about their archives and how they have approached their collections to this point.

• Updates on our digitization projects and partners.

• Pop-up digital exhibitions from our digital collections.

We have been working hard on these ventures, and now we’re excited to start sharing them with you!