Kat Bawden is an artist, educator, and curator in Chicago. She works across photography, video, performance, and light-based installations to explore the relationship between the body, traumatic memory, and perception.
Central to her practice is photography as a form of ontological inquiry – a means of mediating, questioning, and reconstructing reality. Kat uses the camera as a tool for embodied exploration and provocation, creating images that hover between private interiority and voyeuristic gaze. Attuned to the physiological and emotional effects of light, Kat constructs immersive visual environments that echo between presence and memory, inviting viewers into charged spaces of intimacy, disorientation, and reflection.
Kat holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an artist-in-residence with Prairie Ronde, ISSP Latvia, and Artists in Public Schools. Before becoming an artist, she studied political philosophy and environmental science at the University of Michigan and worked as a community organizer and teacher. She teaches at Dominican University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kat’s work has been featured in Artforum, Der Grief, Lenscratch, Chicago Reader, Chicago Sun-Times, and others. She has exhibited or performed at the International Center of Photography, EXPO Chicago, the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Design Museum of Chicago, Iceberg Projects, Filter Photo, Co-Prosperity, Prairie Ronde Artist Gallery, Comfort Station, and others.
In 2023 she started Murmuration, an experimental art space in Chicago and artist residency on her family’s farm in Wisconsin.
Contact: bawdenka@gmail.com // Instagram // CV
