Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator.  She is the Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For the last decade, Kennedy has focused on commissioning new work by international emerging artists in the form of large-scale, site-specific installations and solo projects that exist at the borders of genres. Kennedy teaches Contemporary Art History at Portland State University, where she directed the MFA Visiting Artist Program and Lecture Series (2011-2015), and founded the programs companion journal STUDIO. Kennedy is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon. While the artist identifies as a painter, she also questions the history, process and medium that she is complicit in perpetuating. Curator and critic Stephanie Snyder says of Kennedy’s paintings in Artforum, “their intense dialectic of beauty and repulsion mirrors the artist’s philosophical struggles—we sense that both artist and artwork have gone through the wringer—together—to achieve a hard-won grace”. Recent exhibitions include Flat Fix, Halsey McKay Gallery, NY; Eyes, Ditch Projects, OR; Sunday, Crisp-Ellert Museum, FL; Kristan Kennedy Meets a Clock, Soloway, NY; Sleeper, Fourteen30 Contemporary, OR; OO, Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Tomorrow, Tomorrow, CANADA and Other Colors, Fourteen30 Contemporary.