Kianga Ford
Working with sound and environment as primary media,
Kianga Ford’s narrative experiments query the
psycho-physical dimensions of social identity
formation. Her immersive, often story-based,
installations engage the viewer in a participatory
exploration of the limits between individual and
collective, intimate and public, given and contingent,
categorical and particular. In the increasingly
considered field of sound art, she has worked
collaboratively with a range of international
composers from Toronto to Berlin as well as recently
with the Frankfurt-based Forsythe Company. Her work
has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum
in Harlem, The California African-American Museum, The
Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), and The Brooklyn
Institute for Contemporary Art. Her recent solo shows
include presentations of new work at Lisa Dent
Gallery, San Francisco and Occidental College, Los
Angeles. Ford is one of 30 artists selected for the
2006 California Biennial. Her explorations with
narrative are informed by her studies in English and
Theater at Georgetown University, where she received
her BA in 1994, and post-graduate work in film at NYU.
Ford received her MFA in 2003 from UCLA, where she
studied with Mary Kelly in the Interdisciplinary
Studio program. She is currently a doctoral candidate
in the History of Consciousness program at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is
completing a dissertation on articulations of race and
identity in contemporary exhibition. She lectures
frequently on her dual-inquiry into questions of
contemporary identity in discourse and practice and
has recently spoken at SFAI, MIT, NYU, Stanford, and
USC. She has published texts and criticism in several
anthologies and also for the UCLA Hammer Museum and
X-tra Magazine among others. She is currently
artist-in-residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.
Ford is Assistant Professor in the Studio for
Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and
a Visiting Faculty member in the Department of Visual
Arts at University of California, San Diego. She
lives and works in Los Angeles and Boston.