ARTIST BIO

Kathryn Cornelius is an interdisciplinary artist with a 20 year career that combines performance, video, photography, installation, writing, sound, sculpture, and social media in her practice. Kathryn’s art is intuitively guided, informed by her devotion to mysticism and her connection to the land and energetic blueprints she is called to explore in creating her work. 

Cornelius has exhibited internationally in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Argentina, and nationally in New York City, Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Her work has been featured in solo & group exhibitions and art fairs with Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt, Germany), Studio Stefania Miscetti (Rome, Italy), and Curator's Office (Washington, DC).

She has taught video production and cultural theory at George Washington University and The Corcoran College of Art and Design. Cornelius has been an invited speaker at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Popular Culture Association, The Slought Foundation, Fringe Festival, and Katzen Art Center.

She served as the Lead Mentor for Transformer’s “Exercises 10: Conceptual Art” program supporting emerging artists with critiques and guidance in the development of solo exhibitions. Cornelius also served on the Phillips Collection Contemporaries Steering Committee and Arlington Arts Center Board.

Cornelius has participated in public performances with Marina Abramović, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Tania Bruguera, and studied performance art with Hayley Newman at The Tate Modern. She has been an artist in residence at Mildred’s Lane, The Outpost, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Her work is held in multiple global private and corporate collections.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art practice investigates social systems, power dynamics, and the beliefs that create constellations of energetic agreements between people, places, and things. I work with the Body as a vessel, an embodiment of truth that can become a source of alchemical transformation beyond unconscious ideologies of limitation, separation, lack, and disempowerment. 

In my interdisciplinary artwork, I aim to inspire people to question how and why we think we know what we know, and to open up portals of possibility through which people can perceive themselves and the world differently. Sometimes this takes shape in a live interactive art piece, wherein the audience becomes actively engaged in reshaping a relational dynamic. Other works involve private performances within the land that then are documented into photography and video works that are supported with channeled text and multilayered natural and programmed sounds to create an atmosphere for contemplative inquiry.

My work is an invitation into heart-centered exploration of conscious connection within and beyond the self: where the mundane becomes mystical; intimacy invites catharsis; liminal space is embraced; and our innate goodness and wholeness is a felt remembrance of our sovereignty.