Kendra Keefer is an interdisciplinary artist and poet. She designs installations combining new and traditional media, including video, painting, photography, and poetry. Through fieldwork, storytelling, and autoethnography, her work interrogates how trauma informs patterns of behavior and finds kinship with other animals. The work also examines themes of movement and connection/disconnection to the landscape, the specificness of place, and a craving for home as vehicles for a deeper connection to the natural environment.
Keefer is mother to three children, all neurodiverse, two queer, whose humor and brilliance inspire and sustain her. Her role, as their advocate and ally, and the lack of community support and resources for people in marginalized communities, has become a sight of investigation for her work.
Currently, after completing a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, she teaches at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and Southwestern Illinois College. Keefer also has a BFA in Painting in Painting and Drawing and an MA in Art Museum Education from the University of North Texas, Denton. In 2002, she won a Marcus Fellowship to research how to transform art museums into welcoming spaces for underserved communities. She has worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, MA, and at low-income public schools in rural Texas.
