Kean O'Brien

Kean O’Brien received an MA in Education and Leadership in 2022, an MFA from CalArts in 2011, and a BFA from SAIC in 2008. O’Brien is in their second year of the Ph.D. Program here at UW-Madison.

Kean O’Brien (he/they) is a disabled and transgender multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer living in Madison. His work is both personal and pedagogical, exploring the intersections of gender, whiteness, and embodied trauma. His current research is creating trans crip nihilism theory and looking at specific art projects and analyzing them from this lens.

Recent and upcoming writing publications include:
The Desire for Ugliness: Queers, Rebels, and Freaks (part of Vol. 5 Playing Shakespeare’s Characters, published by Peter Lang Press). Home: The Trans Body (FWD: Museum, published by UIC Museum Studies Department and Sister Spit, 2020), Boyle Heights and The Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence (The American Quarterly Journal, published by John Hopkins Press, 2019), The American Culture of Guns and Prisons (FAYN Magazine, 2017), and others.

O’Brien has exhibited, screened, and curated work at Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Emory College, Fotografiska Museum, The Gay and Lesbian Canadian Archive, and Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in South Korea, among others.

They have also shared their experience as a creative and educator with various institutions, speaking at the University of Illinois, the University of New Mexico, the University of Lebanon, Beirut, the University of Arizona in Tucson, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, the American Studies Conference in Honolulu, and the San Francisco Art Institute.