Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents Ben Kinsley
Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents Ben Kinsley
The Department of Art is proud to present Ben Kinsley as part of its Fall 2026 Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
Ben Kinsley is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, video, and social/contextual practice. His projects have ranged from choreographing a neighborhood intervention into Google Street View, directing surprise theatrical performances inside the homes of strangers, staging a royal protest, collecting put-down jokes from around the world, and hosting a lecture series in an aspen grove.
Kinsley has exhibited internationally at venues such as: Queens Museum, NYC; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland; Bureau for Open Culture; Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Flux Space, Philadelphia; Katonah Museum of Art, NY; Green on Red Gallery, Dublin; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence; La Galería de Comercio, Mexico City; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; Skaftfell Art Center, Iceland; Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Ireland; and Platform, Finland. His work has been featured on NPR, Associated Press, The Washington Post, Artforum.com, Wired.com, Rhizome.org, and Hyperallergic, among others.
Since 2019, Kinsley has collaborated with Riitta Ikonen and Jessica Langley on award winning mushroom costumes for the Telluride Mushroom Festival. They are the subjects of the mockumentary “Fest in Show”, and their costumes have been featured in the film “Fantastic Fungi”, in Mushroom People Magazine, FUNGI, Travel + Leisure, Vogue, and National Geographic.
Kinsley is an Associate Professor and Director of Visual Art in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Co-Founder of The Yard, a project space and site for public art based in his front yard in Colorado Springs.