Kim Stringfellow is a visual artist, photographer, writer, educator, and independent curator whose work is deeply engaged with landscapes shaped by human-driven transformation. Her practice is research-based and interdisciplinary, often manifesting as site-specific, multi-year transmedia documentary projects that combine photography, text, audio, video, mapping, installation, and community engagement.
Stringfellow’s work is grounded in ecological, cultural, scientific, and historical inquiry. She is particularly interested in how human occupation, intervention, policies, and the economy shape landscapes — especially in the desert regions of the American West.
Her projects have received commissions and funding from prominent arts and humanities organizations, including California Humanities, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Seattle Arts Commission, and Desert X. She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and a 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow.
In 2012, she became the second recipient of the Theo Westenberger Award for Artistic Excellence. The award honors the achievements of contemporary women working in photography, film, and new media, who transform how we see the American West. To coincide with her receipt of the award, Jackrabbit Homestead was exhibited at the Autry National Center’s Irene Helen Jones Parks Gallery of Art from September 13, 2014, to August 23, 2015. Jackrabbit Homestead was featured in the 2021 edition of the prestigious biennial exhibition Desert X.
Her work is held in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Western Americana Collection; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Altered Landscape Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art; and special collections at UC Riverside, UC Irvine, and the Library of Congress. Her projects have been exhibited at The International Center for Photography (ICP), LACMA, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), The Autry National Center, The Nevada Museum of Art, UC Riverside’s Culver Arts Center, UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and MOAH (Museum of Art and History), among others. International exhibitions include Cubitt in London, UK; the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Tallinn, Estonia; and the José Martí National Library in Havana, Cuba. In 2024, her photographs were included in three Southern California PST: Art & Science Collide group exhibitions, made possible by a Getty initiative. Stringfellow was featured in KCET’s LOST LA Desert Fantasy, hosted by Nathan Masters, released in October 2018.
Curatorial projects include Alabama Gates 2024; The Mojave Project Field Tours; the 2022 The Mojave Project Webinar Series; After the Aqueduct at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 2015; and Digital State: New Faculty and Student Work at SDSU in 2003.
Stringfellow’s books include Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005, and Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–2008, both published by the Center for American Places and the Mojave Project Reader series. She is a Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University’s School of Art + Design and received an honorary doctorate from Claremont Graduate University in 2018.
To download full CV please click here.
Click here to link to Kim Stringfellow Photographs and Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Photo: Nathan Masters interviews Kim Stringfellow for KCET’s LOST LA Desert Fantasy episode in 2018.