Richard Kennedy (b. 1985, US) is an artist, experiential composer, and librettist originally from Middletown Ohio and currently living in Berlin, Germany. Kennedy’s multi-disciplinary practice includes a focus on the disruption of traditions of Western Theatre, where the primary mode of engagement is through observation, in order to generate new, participatory modes of viewership. Kennedy works in painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance in order to examine notions of the Queer African American experience. In performances that blur the boundaries between choreography and pictorial compositions, between the performers and the audience, between the spaces of the opera and the club, Kennedy celebrates the subversive possibility of an operatic creation that is open to the multiplicity and fluidity of gender, class and race.

They received their MFA from the Milton Avery Institute at Bard College (Hudson, United States of America) and they are a 2021 Hermitage Fellow and a 2019 MacDowell Fellow. Kennedy has presented solo exhibitions at Peres Projects (Berlin) & Nuno Centeno (Porto, Portugal), as well as solo performance works at ICA Richmond (Virginia, USA), The Studio Museum Harlem, MoMA, The Shed, and The Kitchen (New York), and Palais de Tokyo (Paris).  This fall Richard will have their debut museum solo show “Awake in a Nightmare”  at Kunsthalle Winterthur, a solo show “Libretto Accidentalle” at Peres Projects Milan, and will premiere their opera “Zeferina” at The Industry (Los Angeles).

As of July 2022