Born in 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA, Courtney Kessel received her BFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA in 1998 and will complete an MFA in Sculpture and the Expanded Practice from Ohio University in 2012. Kessel has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Tampa Museum of Art, Exit Art: The First World in New York, NY, St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Art and with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. She was included in Renegades: 25 Years of Performance at Exit Art (2007) and selected as one of five students in Ohio representing MFA programs statewide in State of the MFA (2010) at the Ohio State University’s Urban Art Space. She received a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women (2008) and has a Scholarship and Graduate Assistantship from Ohio University (2009-12).

Kessel’s work is engaged in the use of language as a medium, the repositioning of the domestic within the gallery, and the synthesis of those two in dialog with a feminist methodology. Through sculpture, performance, video, and audio work, she performs a visibility that, in normative patriarchal society, is preferred to remain unspoken and invisible. Kessel uses temporal media such as talcum powder or sand to undo the apparent concreteness of language. Other work involves materials such as bronze and steel to speak to the permanent role of the mother.