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.