Kat Bawden (she/they, b. Chicago, IL) is an artist working across photography, installation, and performance. Her practice incorporates image-making and photographic processes as means to explore traumatic experience and the body while questioning our relationship to reality, control, and truth. Her live performances and installations are natural extensions of this photographic practice, attuning viewers’ bodies to the physiological and emotional effects of light. Inviting viewers into somatically-immersive visual worlds, Kat’s work asks how we can more deeply situate ourselves in our lives and in our capacity for transformation.
Kat holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was awarded the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship. Recent performances and exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the International Center of Photography, EXPO Chicago, the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Design Museum of Chicago, Roots & Culture, Iceberg Projects, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence with Prairie Ronde, ISSP Latvia, and Artists in Public Schools and was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. Kat’s work has been featured in Artforum, Der Grief, Lenscratch, Chicago Reader, Chicago Sun-Times, Sixty Inches from Center, and others.
Before becoming an artist, Kat studied political philosophy and environmental science at the University of Michigan and worked as a community organizer, documentarian, and teacher. In 2023 she started Murmuration, an experimental art space and artist residency. She teaches photography and video art at Dominican University.
Headshot credit: Kat Bawden
Image: Kat Bawden, Northern Flicker, 2024, installation of digital video projections and sunlight