An ongoing project for more than 20 years, "Sorted Books" documents library collections across the United States, ranging from private homes to specialized public book collections. Beginning as an experiment in graduate school in the early 1990s, Katchadourian approaches each collection with a similar process by culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are photographs of the book clusters and examine the particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies—a cross-section of the library’s holdings.

Katchadourian was invited to work with the books in a family home in Austin, TX in the spring of 2013. Two adults and their three kids (aged 14, 17 and 20) lived in a large home with more books than perhaps any other family home Katchadourian had been in. The adults' bedside tables were piled high with books, with more books under the tables. There were books in the kitchen, the bathrooms and hallways. There was even a large book closet, the contents of which would have been enough for a book sorting project all of its own. It took a long time to look at all the books in the house and Katchadourian spent two days making an eighteen-page hand-written list, noting all potentially useful book titles, in advance of starting any book sorting at all. Moving through the house was like moving through zones of shifting subject matter and personalities. The adults' home offices had serious books on politics, history, health, care for aging parents, self-help, and a lot of contemporary fiction. In the most public areas Katchadourian found thick books about design and art history, and art catalogs often related to the art collection hanging in the house. The cookbooks on the kitchen shelves lived in proximity to the books on the flora and fauna of Texas, with some occasional crossover. Katchadourian was amused to find "Texas Snakes" near "The New Texas Cuisine" and decided to work with this happy accident.

Katchadourian spent a great deal of time upstairs, in the kids' rooms. The oldest boy had a lot of outdoor adventure literature, a genre Katchadourian is personally very fond of. The book spines in the teenage girl's room were predominantly blue, pink, or pastel yellow with language that took a distinctly wordy, chatty, mildly provocative tone. Katchadourian’s favorite shelves were the ones with hundreds of picture books that had been read to the kids when they were very young. These books had tall, skinny spines and humorous or poignant titles that the artist often took out of context and merged with the adults' books.

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. Her video "Accent Elimination" was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Katchadourian’s work has been widely published, including her monograph, "Sorted Books," published by Chronicle Books in 2013. 

Her work is public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection and Saatchi Gallery. The Tang Museum exhibited Katchadourian's first museum survey in 2005. In March 2017, a traveling survey exhibition of her work titled "Curiouser" will open at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, with an accompanying monograph. Following the Blanton, "Curiouser" will open at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in the fall of 2017.