Kerry Downey

Kerry Downey's interdisciplinary practice (video, performance, installation, paper works, and writing) explores embodied forms of resistance and transformation. They use experimental strategies to draw connections between interior worlds and sociopolitical landscapes. Downey's research centers affect theory, queer and trans studies, with an emphasis on creative play as praxis. They are currently engaged in a multi-year project working with their high school archives—love letters, photos, audio/video, and ephemera. As a queer teenager of the '90s, Downey obsessively archived all their handmade, intimate exchanges, before the internet forever changed the ways we communicate and memorialize our lives. By utilizing performance gestures and diverse methods of material re/deconstruction, they investigate alchemical processes that reshape ideas of inheritance and legacy.

Recent Courses Taught

Introduction to Video
Introduction to Animation

Research Interests

Painting, drawing, performance art, printmaking, video art, queer art and identity

Distinctions

• New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient (2026)
• Recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Art Career Opportunity Grant (2018)
• Recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2016)
• Recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation's Emerging Artist Grant (2015)
• Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellow (2012)
• Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship, Yale University School of Art (2001)
• Suzanne Clements Zimmer Prize for Fine Art (2001)

Selected Publications

• "The River Flows Both Ways." The Brooklyn Rail, May 2025
• "The Art of Anxiety in the Age of Digital Documentation." Hand Papermaking, June 2025
• Making Mountains into Molehills: A Lexicon-inProcess, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 24:1, 53-57, DOI: 10.1080/15240657.2022.21597 2023

Select Exhibitions

Solo Shows

• along, among, around, beside, between, beyond, despite, except, following, for, from, inside, like, near, of, off, on, outside, over, pass, through, to, toward, under, until, within, without, Underdonk Gallery, curated by Georgia Elrod, Brooklyn, NY. 2024
• Wormholes, Soloway Gallery, curated by Orli Swergold, Brooklyn, NY. 2023
• This is a reenactment but this time will be different, The New Media Artspace at Baruch College; curated by Katherine Behar, public exhibition with public lecture and class visits, New York, NY. 2023

Group Exhibitions

• Two person exhibition with Elizabeth Tubergan, Ruthann Gallery, Catskill, NY. 2026, forthcoming
• [ ], Rinse, Repeat, CCS Bard / Hessel Museum, curated by Gemima Godfrey, Macaella Gray, Luis Juárez, Elizabeth Smith, and Chloe Zhong, Annandale, NY. 2025
• A Gnawing Thought, curated by Mandolyn Wilson Rosen, Utopia Gallery, Kingston, NY. 2025
• And I Always Will, Flowers Fest, Essex Flowers, New York, NY. 2025
• To House A River, Glasshouse, culminating exhibition for Conversation Lab, New Paltz, NY. 2025
• Death and Data with Temp.Files, Resonant Gallery, Western Michigan University, Grand Rapids, MI. 2025
• Zufall???Schicksal!!! (Coincidence??? Fate!!!) curated by Miriam Laura Leonardi, Gallery L’ELAC, ECAL, Lausanne, Switzerland. 2025
• Playing in the Street, Step Mother Nature, Bloomington, NY. 2025
• Motherlode with Liz Collins, RISD Museum, Providence, RI. 2025
• Winter Garden, RUTHANN, Catskill, NY. 2025

Permanent Collections

• The University of Arizona Museum of Art
• The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard Center for Curatorial Studies
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art Artist books collection

Appointed to the Faculty

2026

Educational Background

M.F.A., Hunter College
M.F.A. exchange, Glasgow School of Art
B.A., Bard College