Speaking

Katherine de Vos Devine is an intellectual property attorney, legal scholar, and art historian whose work sits at the intersection of copyright law, feminist theory, and the cultural economy of art. She holds a J.D. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University — both earned simultaneously, both trained on the same question: who controls creative work, and how.

Her dissertation, "A Dangerous Undertaking: Appropriation Art, Intellectual Property, and Fair Use since the 1990s" (Duke, 2017), argued that the history of contemporary appropriation art is indissolubly interconnected with changes in intellectual property law — a framework the Supreme Court confirmed in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023). Her current scholarship applies classical property theory and feminist art history to copyright doctrine: "The Treachery of Estates" examines how artists' estates invoke personal attributes that the in rem copyright transfer at death does not convey; a second article, "Lady Justice's Male Gaze," argues that Justice Kagan's celebrated dissent in Warhol imports an unexamined male-dominated critical lineage into copyright doctrine with distributional consequences for whose creative labor is legally legible as art.

She co-founded Implement Legal, a boutique IP and transactional law firm in Chapel Hill, NC, and teaches Arts & Entertainment Law at Queens University of Charlotte. Prior to law practice, she served as executive director of arts organizations in western North Carolina and held curatorial and administrative roles at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

She has presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, Yale School of Art, the Harvard/Getty Foundation's Beautiful Data symposium, the UNC Charlotte Art History Symposium, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She writes Protect Your Magic on Substack and The Secret Weapon on LinkedIn.

TOPICS

Available for conference keynotes, panels, symposia, workshops, and CLE presentations.

Copyright and fair use — doctrine as it's actually moving, including Warhol v. Goldsmith and its implications for AI training data, artists' estates, and the limits of transformative use.

Appropriation art and IP law — the historical and legal development of appropriation from the 1990s through the present, including the extraction logic running from Koons and Prince to generative AI.

Feminist theory and IP law — how unexamined aesthetic hierarchies and canon-bound art criticism enter copyright doctrine, and what a more expansive interpretive framework requires.

Artists' estates and posthumous rights — what happens to creative identity and copyright control after death, and where the law draws lines estates routinely ignore.

Contracts and business formation for creatives — practical workshops on licensing agreements, gallery representation, commission structures, and business formation for artists and creative businesses.

AI, land use, and recursive enclosure — an original theoretical framework connecting IP extraction to physical infrastructure extraction, and what existing legal frameworks cannot see about the loop.

RECENT TALKS

Yale School of Art · 2026 Ink on Paper: An Artists' Contracts Workshop

UNC Charlotte Art History Symposium · 2026 Art Law — Keynote

McColl Center, Charlotte · 2025 Beyond the Studio: Ink on Paper, A Practical Guide to Artists' Contracts

College Art Association, New York · 2025 Navigating the Changing Terrain of Fair Use in the Digital World

College Art Association, Chicago · 2024 The Treachery of Institutions: Artists' Estates and Fair Use

SELECTED PRIOR APPEARANCES

Yale School of Art · 2023 "Contracts for Artists"

Center for Craft · 2022 "Copyright for Creatives" / "Contracts for Creatives"

University of Rochester · 2021 "Art Law: A Practitioner's Perspective"

Mountain Bizworks · 2021, 2023, 2025 Contracts, copyright, and M&A for creative businesses

Rhode Island School of Design · 2020 "Legal Q+A for Artists, Freelancers & Small Businesses"

Mass MoCA · 2020 "Legal Q+A for Artists, Freelancers & Small Businesses"

University of California, Berkeley · 2018 Beyond Academia Conference — "Technical and Specialized Consulting" and "Intellectual Property"