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Patterns Are For Breaking Video Feedback Projection Public InstallationPortland Winter Light Festival.jpeg)
Blue, In Parts Selection from painting and photography public art installation, Portugal Watercolor, Ink, Oil and Chalk Pastels on Archival Paper.jpg)
Flight Patterns Acrylic, Charcoal, Chalk Pastel on Wood Panels.jpg)
From the Lines, Those That Fall Off the Map project Acrylic, Charcoal, Chalk Pastel on Wood Panels
Biography
Kirsten Rian: multidisciplinary artist & writer
Kirsten Rian, MA, MFA, is a photography curator, visual artist, and writer. She has curated or managed more than 375 photography exhibitions, and picture edited or written for over 80 books and catalogues. She is active in the international photography as well as book arts communities. She is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a writer, painter, and installation artist, reflecting a commitment to community--both in her immediate orbit, as well as in the greater international context. Recent international exhibitions incorporated video, painting, photography, and words.
She has led creative writing workshops both domestically, as well as internationally in locations like post-war Sierra Leone and refugee relocation centers in Finland, and with human trafficking survivors, using creative writing as a tool for literacy and peacebuilding, and locally is a volunteer language facilitator for non-native speakers. Her work explores how storytelling and sharing through creative mediums often allows the hardest and most necessary aspects of human history and experience to be remembered, and in fact, honored.
In her distant past, her life as a musician was front and central, she co-owned an independent record label, made 8 records, and garnered airplay on radio stations across the country. (Interview below about this history...). She is an essayist and poet, and the author of three books. Her anthology of Sierra Leonean poets and their accounts of the civil war, Kalashnikov in the Sun, was at one point in every classroom in Sierra Leone. Life Expectancy was released in 2018 by Redbat Books as part of their Pacific Northwest Writers Series. Lewis & Clark College selected her poetry to publish in a limited-edition book. She was the author of the weekly photography column “The Alphabet of Light” for Daylight Magazine, was the poetry editor at The Oregonian newspaper, and is the recipient of numerous artist fellowships and grants.