Laura Kina is Vincent de Paul Professor of
Art, Media, & Design and a Global Asian Studies and Women’s and Gender
Studies affiliated faculty member. Her artwork deals with themes of distance
and belonging and her scholarly research is focused on Asian American and mixed
race identity and history. 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 Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and the Wing Luke
Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle, WA. Kina’s solo shows
include “Blue Hawaiʻi” at New
Jersey City University Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery (2015) and The University of
Memphis Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art (2014), “Sugar” Woman
Made Gallery, Chicago, IL (2010), “A Many Splendored Thing”
at
the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL (2010), “Loving” Grand
Project, New Haven, CT, (2006), and “Aloha Dreams”
(2007)
and “Hapa Soap Opera” (2003) at Diana Lowenstein
Gallery, Miami, FL.
Kina was born in California in 1973 and grew
up in the Poulsbo, WA. 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. Kina is co-editor, along with Wei
Ming Dariotis, of War
Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington
Press, 2013). The National
Endowment for the Arts funded her curation of “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race
Asian American Art” at the DePaul Art Museum and the Wing Luke Museum. Kina is
also cofounder of the DePaul biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies conference; co-founder of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies through University of California Santa
Barbara; and a reviews editor for the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures
and the Americas journal (Brill). In 2012, Diversity MBA
Magazine selected Kina as one of the “Top 100 Executive & Emerging Leaders
Under 50” in the U.S. Kina is currently working on a second anthology, along
with art historian Jan Christian Bernabe, titled Que(e)rying Contemporary Asian American Art. “Sugar/Island: Finding
Okinawa in Hawaiʻi – the work of Laura Kina and Emily Hanako Momohara”
will be on view July 12-Sept 6, 2015 at the Japanese American National Museum
in Los Angeles.