Kristan Kennedy is an artist, curator, and educator in Portland, Oregon who has exhibited internationally. She works with various media including sculpture and painting. Kennedy is the Visual Art curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon. Kennedy curates video, installation, music and new media projects for PICA's annual Time-Based Art Festival. She is the co-founder of the artist collective Swallow Press with artist Topher Sinkinson and their temporal public projects have been presented internationally. Her printed ephemera is held in several book collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Dartmouth College and the New York Public Library. In April 2018, Kennedy was awarded the Bonnie Bronson Award, a prestigious regional award administered by Reed College that annually awards "a no-strings-attached cash prize to an artist of outstanding merit who lives and works in the Pacific Northwest."
Career
Kennedy received her BFA from the New York State College of Art and Design at Alfred University, Alfred NY, with a concentration on Printmaking and New Media in 1994. Kennedy currently teaches Contemporary Art History at Portland State University, where she also organizes their MFA Visiting Artist Program and Lecture Series. Kennedy was included in both the 1999 and 2006 Oregon Biennials at the Portland Art Museum. Her work has been published in Plazm and Nudity in Groups. Kennedy began her long tenure at PICA as a volunteer and joined the Board of Trustees in 2002. She joined PICA's staff in 2003, managing public relations and marketing campaigns for the organization. In Summer 2005, Kennedy moved positions to manage the Visual Program. On November 28, 2017, Kennedy was promoted along with Roya Amirsoleymani and Erin Boberg Doughton as Artistic Directors. At PICA, Kennedy oversees the Precipice Fund, a grant for artist-run organizations and collaborative projects in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. Kennedy is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. She sits on the advisory board for the Headlands Center for the Arts and is the former Board President of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. Kennedy represents PICA as a member of several emerging consortiums including the Visual Art Network, a pilot project of the National Performance Network. She has served as a juror, panelist, and advisor to several foundations and granting organizations, including Creative Capital, The Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Southern Exposure's Alternate Exposure Grants among others. Kennedy was invited to participate in "Curating People," a symposium at The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley on April 28 and 29, 2011.
