Courtney Kessel is a mother, artist, academic, and arts administrator living and working in Athens, Ohio. Kessel exhibits her work nationally and internationally including the China Art Museum, Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago Chile, the University of Alberta, Canada, Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Florence, Italy, and Exit Art, New York. She has lectured on her work and research in both universities and museums from the Norton Museum of Art to Brigham Young University Art Museum.

Through sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound, Courtney Kessel’s work strives to make visible the quiet, understated, and often unseen love and labor of motherhood. In the annual performance piece, In Balance With (2010-present), Kessel presents a version of the maternal which investigates collaboration with her (now 18-year-old) daughter as a visible, changeable aspect of mothering. Other projects which reflect over a decade of research into the subjective maternal include: Mother Lode, Symphony of the Domestic, Cut From the Same, Fabric of Life and the video Sharing Space.

She is currently the Assistant Director for Experiential Design at Ohio University and a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Arts. She earned her MFA in Sculpture & Expanded Practices from Ohio University, and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art.

Educational Background:

MFA, Sculpture & Expanded Practices
Certificate, Women’s & Gender Studies, Ohio University
BFA, Sculpture, Tyler School of Art Studied at Temple University Rome, Italy