Bio:
Kean O’Brien (b. 1984, Lima, Ohio) is a white queer, chronically ill, disabled, artist, educator, and academic living between Chicago and Madison. As a multimedia artist working interdisciplinarily between photography, painting, found images, installation, and writing, Kean focuses on the nuance of gendered construction, whiteness, and the body as a landscape for survival, death, grief, and trauma. Kean's academic writing explores the current landscape of higher education from an abolitionist, decolonial lens and has a longstanding commitment to radical pedagogy, community building, and grassroots organizing. Kean is called upon to approach work from a place of solidarity with the communities and environments that hold; to create a sustainable collective for art and writing to thrive in and to aid in the breaking down of the toxic systems leading marginalized bodies, earth and society to global collapse.
Kean O’Brien received an MA in Education and Leadership in 2022, an MFA from CalArts in 2011, and graduated with a BFA from SAIC in 2008, and is currently a Ph.D. student at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Recent and upcoming writing publications include The Desire for Ugliness: Queers, Rebels, and Freaks, (part of Vol. 5 Playing Shakespeare's Characters, published by Peter Lang Press).
Home: The Trans Body (FWD: Museum, published by UIC Museum Studies Department and Sister Spit, 2020), Boyle Heights and The Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence (The American Quarterly Journal, published by John Hopkins Press, 2019), The American Culture of Guns and Prisons (FAYN Magazine, 2017), and others.
O’Brien has exhibited, screened, and curated work at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Emory College, Fotografiska Museum, The Gay and Lesbian Canadian Archive, and Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in South Korea, among others. They have also shared their experience as creative educator with various institutions, speaking at University of Illinois, the University of New Mexico, University of Lebanon, Beirut, University of Arizona in Tucson, University of California, Santa Cruz, National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, American Studies Conference in Honolulu, and San Francisco Art Institute.
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