Kristan Kennedy (b. 1972, Brooklyn, New York) is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator. Kennedy identifies as a painter while also questioning the exclusionary 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”.

Kennedy‘s practice extends into curatorial and pedagogical work. She is the Artistic Director, Curator of Visual Art for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For more than a decade, Kennedy has focused on commissioning new work by international emerging artists in the form of large-scale, site-specific installations and solo project that exist at the borders of genres. Kennedy teaches in the Visual Studies MFA progra at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) Contemporary Art.

Kristan Kennedy has maintained an active exhibition practice for more than two decades, with solo and two-person exhibitions at venues including NOON Projects in Los Angeles, Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Soloway in Brooklyn, Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, and the Crisp-Ellert Museum in Florida. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions across the United States and internationally, with presentations at institutions and galleries such as the Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon Contemporary, Halsey McKay Gallery, CANADA, and exhibitions in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, The Hague, and Glasgow.