Professor Kristen Kreider is a writer and artist. Her research stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialization as form, and a concern with how artworks relate to the world. On the one hand, this research results in a body of poetry, art-writing and academic writing – including the monograph Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Signs, Subject and Sites (IB Tauris, 2014) – that employs various forms, modes and genres to open up and communicate meaning. On the other hand, this research results in practice-led research outputs of performance, installation and video work produced in collaboration with architect James O’Leary.
Combining aspects of performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction and image-making, the work of Kreider + O’Leary exposes and interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. Since 2003 they have made work in response to prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments, urban districts and gallery contexts both in the UK and internationally. Their work has been shown at venues including Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy as well as in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Istanbul Biennial; their book Falling was published by Copy Press and Field Poetics by Ma Bibliothèque. Kreider + O’Leary are currently completing a large-scale project and related monograph, Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2025), exploring four situations globally where communities have formed amidst social and political turbulence.
Having previously held Professorships in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and University of Oxford, Kristen is currently Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
