Kristen Letts Kovak is a Pittsburgh-based artist who explores how visual perception informs the act of representation and defines our understanding of abstraction. After completing her undergraduate art degrees from Mercyhurst University, she earned her MFA in Studio Art from MICA in 2010. Since 2012, Kovak has taught drawing, applied aesthetics, and visual perception at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean for the College of Fine Arts.

Kovak’s artworks balance opposing forces to arrive at states of perpetual becoming. In her practice, she reflects on the uncertainties of chronic illness and disability, reframing divergence and disruption as catalysts for possibility. Her drawings and paintings occupy indeterminate psychological spaces and shift out of alignment, foiling recognition. “What might once be seen as irregular or incomplete becomes, in Kovak’s vision, a celebration of persistence and possibility: bodies that take up space, defy explanation, and exist fully in their own mysterious order.” -Stella Witcher

Her work has been shown in over a hundred exhibitions spanning galleries, art centers, universities, and a dozen museums, including the Muskegon Museum of Art, University of Central Florida, SPACE gallery, The Center for Contemporary Art, Metrospace, Dairy Arts Center, Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Wildling Art Museum, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Erie Art Museum, Museum of the Red River, and the Woodson Art Museum. Her recent solo exhibitions have debuted at Marshall University, York College, the Rosewood Art Center, 707 & 709 Penn Galleries, and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.