Song on repeat: I don’t think I have one. My husband thinks it’s funny to hum songs, but he can never remember the right words. And then I have this insane concoction of songs stuck in my head.

Coffee or tea? Both.

Guilty pleasure: Chocolate. And I’m not even that guilty about it.

What’s been inspiring you lately? Looking at and spending time with art. I’m going to LA to see an exhibit soon. And I loved taking my students to the art museum on campus last term.

Art, Italy and understanding the human condition all guide this CHC professor as she helps students see what’s truly important in life.

You haven’t seen Clark Honors College Professor Kate Mondloch in action until she takes over a study abroad tour in Florence, Italy. As a guide rants about a microphone system and single-ear-headpieces for the fifth time, Mondloch adjusts her thick, black glasses, straightens her crisp linen shirt, and speaks pointedly.

“See that hill over there,” says Mondloch, a CHC faculty in residence from the College of Design’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture, pointing through a set of medieval arches. “Take the bus to Piazzale Michelangelo tonight,” she says. “You’ll get the best bruschetta and views in all of Florence.”

Mondloch is a professor of contemporary art and theory, who doesn’t shy away from taking charge. She pays keen attention to the beautiful parts of life, mostly by slowing down and taking in things from all angles.

Italy is an integral part of Mondloch’s story, a place she has returned to over the seasons of her life. She brings a spirit of observation and care to her work, and she believes that when people slow down and look around, they appreciate life more. Knowing how to look at art helps. But she hasn’t always approached life this way.

“It’s taken me a lifetime to learn,” she says now. “It only hit me when I began to start to look at art and be with art and these artists…It opened up a different way of being. You can’t force yourself on art because you’re never going to understand it. You have to let it come to you a little bit and meet it halfway.”

Mondloch grew up in Manchester, Washington—a sleepy community close to the Puget Sound area. She describes her childhood as quiet, but her family’s love of adventure kept her moving. She’d spend her summers with her brother and parents, sailing across the blue waters of the

sound, pitching tents, and learning how to scuba dive. “All things I had no desire to do, but my parents forced me to do anyway,” she recalls.

As a child, Mondloch wanted to be an actress, she recalls with a laugh. “But isn’t that what every kid wanted to be?”

In high school, she was deemed “Most Likely To Succeed.” She says she wasn’t bent on getting ahead. “I’ve always been really driven, and it was a part of my upbringing. Not in a ‘we won’t love you if you fail’ way,” she says. “My parents were always very supportive of whatever I decided to try.”

In college, she set out on a path to become a diplomat, attending Georgetown University and studying for a degree in foreign service. She wanted to go to school in Washington, D.C., and Georgetown was known for its prestigious programs in foreign service.

She followed this path, in part, because her dad’s dream was to be a diplomat. “(My parents) figured I would become a CIA agent (and) overthrow a government somewhere,” she says, adding that they valued the idea of her getting a “professional” job after graduating college.

While in college, Mondloch secured an internship with the then-United States Information Agency. She had to get secret clearance and wore a badge, something she says might sound exciting but was considered “totally normal in D.C.” at the time. She remembers the morning rides on the Metro train where people were crammed together, eyeing each other’s badges. “Look at me,” Mondloch recalls the badges seeming to say. “This is what I do.”

At the same time, she also worked at one of the newer coffee shops in Washington, Cafe Northwest. The owners saw Mondloch was from the Seattle area and hired her right away. She worked early shifts, serving lattes and Americanos to senators on their way to the nation’s capital.

In her junior year, something shifted. To get her degree, Mondloch had to choose a country to specialize in, and she picked Russia. To fulfill a course requirement, she signed up for an art history class on Russian art. Her research paper was on Bolshevik posters.

Visually, the posters were bold and red. But there was something deeper that got Mondloch thinking. “You can actually do history and diplomacy and foreign service through art and art objects, which totally blew my mind because I hadn’t been exposed to much art as a kid,” she recalls. “I remember being stunned by art history. It was hard. But I wanted to do it anyway.”

Mondloch was set on finishing her degree in foreign service. But on the weekends, she’d walk until she found an art gallery. She became a devotee of the Hirshhorn Museum and Scultpure Garden, the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery of Art. She’d go by herself and look at exhibits, realizing that she could use art in governmental work. For her, it sparked the beginning of a whole new way of relating with the world.

After graduation, Mondloch started working for the National Endowment for the Arts. She got a lot of practice answering the emails and phone calls from people who didn’t want the government to fund art.

While she was working for the NEA, Mondloch received news that her brother had disappeared, and she went back home to be with her family. After receiving confirmation that he had died, she and her parents decided to chart new paths. Her parents sold everything they owned and bought a small sailboat to travel around the world. And Mondloch flew to Florence, where she had studied abroad in college, to work at the Villa le Balze through a program at Georgetown.

Mondloch made the decision because she wanted to see as much art as she could. With every museum she visited, with every piece of art she spent time with, she knew it was something she could do for the rest of her life.

And it was also in Italy that she met her now-husband, Andrea Loreto, who is the owner of Elixir Distillery in Eugene.

She returned to the U.S. in 1998 and received her PhD from UCLA in 2005. She wrote her dissertation on art and screens, which is a topic explored in her first book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art.

In 2005, Mondloch arrived at the University of Oregon as its first professor of contemporary art history. A trailblazer? Sure. But she saw it differently at the time. “I just remember feeling exhausted,” she says now. Because UO had no contemporary art history department, she was able to make a curriculum completely from scratch. She thinks back to the beginning of her career at UO as a “really important time” because she was able to give guidance to all the talented young artists that were in school and help mentor many of them into practitioners.

Later, she served a stint as interim dean of the Division of Graduate Studies before heading back to her home department.

After seeing the mental health crises that graduate students were facing during COVID-19, Mondloch wanted to help in a different way. “I wanted to work in a small environment where I thought I could make real change,” she says.

There was an opening at the Honors College and she applied. Now, as a CHC faculty in residence, she feels like she can make more of an impact with students because class sizes are small. She loves introducing her students to new works of art and teaching them how to look and observe.

Mondloch teaches “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” a beginning CHC class where she provides students with the tools they need to live a full life.

“There is a part of me that is completely and utterly devoted to college-aged students, because that’s the age I lost my brother,” she says. “And I just see in everybody that sort of hope that things turn out differently.”

Through Mondloch’s courses, students gain tools that promote well-being and regulate emotions. Her message to them is clear: work hard, but you don’t have to do it all on your own.

Right now, her focus with her students is on movements toward slow living. She asks them to consider a variety of questions. Is it a trend? A privilege? Or can they look at slow living as a vital part of grounding during the human experience?

She recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will allow her to complete her third book, Art of Attention: Body-Mind Awareness and Contemporary Art, which is expected to be published in the next few years. The NEH Summer Stipend aims to continue new humanities research and publications, and it is awarded to individuals pursuing advanced and groundbreaking research in the humanities.

Mondloch’s son is an Honors College student, and she enjoys spending time with him and her husband. She feels like she’s truly unlocked the secret to life when cooking and sharing meals with her family.

As her career continues to evolve, Mondloch says she is learning more about the values of slowing down and taking everything in. She considers her career to be successful, but she thinks slowing down helps everyone improve in other ways.

“Well, let’s think of what the opposite (of slowing down) is,” she says. “The opposite is never pausing to reflect on why you’re doing anything, or how you are impacting others and the planet. You’re just so focused on the next move that you don’t realize it’s shortchanging yourself but also everybody else.

“On some level, it is about slowing down, almost just literally that and realizing you’re not the center of the universe. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do a good job. You have a responsibility, I think, to others and to the planet and to yourself to actually investigate what you’re doing and why.”

- Story by Maya McLeroy, Clark Honors College Communications

- Photos by Ilka Sankari, Clark Honors College Communications