Biography
Beth Krensky is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. She received her formal art training from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She was one of five founding members of the international artist collective, the Artnauts. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible.
She is also a scholar of youth-created art for social change. She holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her writing addresses community-based art education, youth activist art, and art for social change. Her co-authored book (with Seana Lowe Steffen), Engaging Classrooms and Communities through Art, is used widely in the community-based art education field.
In 2022, Krensky was named the Utah Higher Education Art Educator of the Year and in 2019, she was selected as one of Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists. Among her academic honors, she has been awarded the Presidential Scholar, Public Service Professor, and Distinguished Teaching awards from the University of Utah. She was selected as one of five performance art finalists for the 16th Arte Laguna Prize.
Artist Statement
Beth Krensky describes herself as “a gatherer of things—objects, words, spirit—and a connector of fragments, to make us whole.”
Her broad artistic practice traverses the borderlands between spirit and matter. She creates objects and performative gestures as a contemplative act. Much of the work, which is cobbled together from the detritus of life, is intended to be portable and able to metaphorically cross layers of shared and contested existence.
Krensky’s practice is rooted in a socio-historical memory of place. Her work addresses pressing issues while providing a refuge—a free space—that allows participants to name themselves, envision a different reality, and engage in the re-making of their world.
