Katherine Jentleson is a PhD candidate in the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, specializing in the art of the United States, with a focus on the interwar period. She is researching and writing her dissertation, "Gatecrashers: The First Generation of Outsider Artists in America." She was the 2014–15 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is now the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Her recent publications include: “Not as rewarding as the North: Holger Cahill's Southern Folk Art Expedition," which won the 2013 Graduate Student Research Prize awarded by the Archives of American Art and the Dedalus Foundation. In Spring 2014, her essay, “Cracks in the Consensus: Outsider Artists and Art World Ruptures” appeared in the catalogue for the Studio Museum's traveling exhibition, "When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South."

Jentleson is also the co-inventor of a pedagogical game called Fantasy Collecting that "gameifies" the task of memorization associated with survey courses and teaches students about the forces that govern the art market. She presented papers on Fantasy Collecting at the annual meetings of the College Art Association and the Association of Internet Researchers in 2014.