Laura Kina is Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, & Design, Director
Critical Ethnic Studies, and a Global Asian Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies affiliated faculty member. She earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing in 1994 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in Studio Art in 2001 from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a summer 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence awardee.
Kina’s artwork focuses on themes of distance, belonging, the fluidity of cultural difference, and the slipperiness of identity. Okinawan and Hawai‘i diaspora and mixed race representations are subjects that run through her work. Asian American, transpacific, contemporary Asian American art, Critical Mixed Race studies, and feminist/queer theory form the nexus for her intersectional scholarly research, publications, and projects.
She has exhibited internationally and nationally, including shows at the India Habitat Centre and India International Centre, New Delhi and Nehuru Art Centre, Mumbai, India; Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Naha, Okinawa, Japan; Chicago Cultural Center and the Spertus Museum, Chicago, IL; The Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, WA.
Her solo exhibitions include: Uchinanchu (Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Culture, California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA and W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona, CA 2016) Blue Hawaii (Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, New Jersey City College, Jersey City, NJ 2015; University of Memphis Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art, Memphis, TN 2014) Sugar (Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL 2010), A Many-Splendored Thing(Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL 2010), Aloha Dreams(Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL 2007),Loving (Grand Projects, New Haven, CT 2006), and Hapa Soap Operas (Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL 2003).
Kina is co-editor of
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017) and
War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). She is the lead curator for the
Virtual Asian American Art Museum; co-founder of the
Critical Mixed Race Studies conference; co-founder of the
Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies through University of California Santa Barbara; a reviews editor for the
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal (Brill), and events editor for
American Quarterly – the official journal of the American Studies Association, and editorial board member of
Amerasia Journal (UCLA). She also serves as a series editor for the University of Washington Press for the forthcoming Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture series.