Kelly Chorpening is an artist, curator, writer and educator with a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She was Course Leader of BA (Hons)

Drawing (2006-2019) and then Programme Director in Fine Art (2019-2022) at Camberwell College

of Arts, University of the Arts London. She was appointed Professor and Chair of Art, Art History and

Design at University of Nevada Reno in 2022. She also serves on the College Art Association’s

Services to Artists committee.

Her work primarily explores drawing, as a contemporary art discipline, and as a tool for thinking and communication across disciplines. She has had solo presentations of work in the UK, USA and

Austria and done residencies that include Voorkamer (Belgium), Shandy Hall, The Laurence Sterne

Trust (UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh). Many of her projects are co-developed as

books, published by Studio International (USA), RGAP (UK), Sint-Lucas Visual Arts and OPAK, FAK,

KULeuven (Belgium). In 2020, she co-edited and contributed to A Companion to Contemporary

Drawing, published by Wiley Blackwell. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemporary

Painting (Intellect, UK) and in 2024, edited and contributed to a double issue on correspondence as

a creative research method.

Her interdisciplinary work has involved collaborations with the Architectural Association, Trinity

Laban Conservatory of Music, the Gordon Museum of Pathology and the National Gallery, London.

In 2023, she chaired and presented at ‘Land, Water, Place: an Art and Science Collaborative’, at

Nevada Museum of Art, a symposium that brought artists, poets, geographers and biologists

together to explore the politics and possibilities of working in the Great Basin region. A curatorial

project, "Drawing in Social Space," was exhibited at Drawing Room London in 2023. The project

involved artists and communities from around the UK, USA, Bolivia, Morocco, Netherlands, Ghana

and Russia, using drawing within collective, creative processes.