Adria Katz

ADRIA HOLMES KATZ

1935 – 2025

Adria Holmes Katz passed away on October 5, 2025 at the age of 90.

She was born on April 28, 1935, in Springfield, MA. Her father was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, and her mother was a trained commercial artist who worked at an art museum before marriage. Adria was raised and schooled in South Hadley, MA. She majored in philosophy at Radcliffe College and graduated summa cum laude in 1956. She then won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Oxford, where she completed a BPhil degree in Philosophy. She returned to the United States to begin a doctoral program in Philosophy at Harvard, where she worked with John Rawls, but decided not to pursue the degree. Adria married her college friend, Stanley Katz, in 1960 and followed him first to Madison, WI and then to Chicago as he pursued an academic career. After a number of years as a full-time mother of two children, she began to volunteer in the Oceanic collections of the Field Museum in Chicago. After the family moved to Princeton in 1978, she pursued her museum work in the Oceanian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology. Having begun her career as an unpaid volunteer without formal credentials in her field, she rose to the position of Keeper of Collections of the Oceanian section, where she assisted a generation of Pacific anthropologists and formed a treasured network of scholars and museum folk. The continuing engagement with the collection by visitors from many places and cultures is a tribute to her legacy at the museum. She retired from the museum in 2019.

Adria had a lifelong love of nature that began with her childhood summers at Kennebunk Beach, ME. Adria and her family spent more than fifty summers in Chocorua, NH, renting a splendid old house on Lake Chocorua and under Mt. Chocorua. She collected mushrooms, watched birds, and hiked the White Mountains with her family. These were the happiest times of a life well lived. She was also an avid and skillful photographer of nature and of her family and friends.

Adria is survived by two children both professors: Derek Holmes Katz (b.1964), who teaches Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Marion Holmes Katz (b. 1967), who teaches Islamic Studies at New York University. She has one grandson, Sam, who is now a law student at Suffolk University in Boston. Her only sibling, Janice Holmes Chapman, resides in Hanover, NH.

Adria and Stanley moved from Princeton to Stonebridge at Montgomery in Skillman in 2021, where she found opportunities for gardening and photography.

Services are private.

Funeral arrangements are by Orland's Ewing Memorial Chapel. For condolences: OrlandsMemorialChapel.com/Adria-Katz