Kara Lynch

Associate Professor Emerita of Video and Critical Studies
Hampshire College Professor kara lynch
Contact Kara

Kara Lynch
413.549.4600

kara lynch is a time-based artist living in the Bronx, NY, and was born in the auspicious year of 1968. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about duration, embodiment, and the aural. Through collective practice and social intervention she explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered: Black-Indigenous-Immigrant, anarchist, queer, and feminist.

Major projects include: "Black Russians," a feature documentary video (2001); "The Outing," a video travelogue (1998-2002); and "Mouhawala Oula," a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video, and saxophone (2010). Her current project, "Invisible," an episodic, multi-site video/audio installation (2003-present), excavates the terror and resilient beauty of the Black experience. She is a 2018 MAPFund recipient for "Saved," an installment of "Invisible." Her projects have been presented internationally in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Russia, Germany, the UK, Palestine, Lebanon, and throughout the U.S. in community cultural centers and established art venues alike. Her videos are collected in major university libraries in the U.S. and Europe.

kara is a member of Interdiciplinario La Lìnea, a feminist artist collective based at the US/Mexico borderlandia. She has published in XC Streetnotes, Ulbandus Review, BFM, contributed audio to Cabinet Magazine, video to PocketMyths, and drawings/writings to the Encyclopedia Project v.II F-K. Along with Henriette Gunkel, kara co-edited We Travel the SpaceWays: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions, an anthology of African Diaspora Futures art, criticism, and conversations published by Transcript, summer 2019.

kara completed her M.F.A. in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. In 2012/13 kara was a research fellow in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas, Austin and the Academy for Advanced African Studies in Bayreuth Germany. She earns a living as an associate professor of video and critical studies at Hampshire College.