Bio
Kenna Lewis is a multidisciplinary artist and designer born in 2000 in Cincinnati, Ohio, working at the intersection of internet culture, memetics, printmaking, digital fabrication, and functional making. Her practice spans sewn soft goods, kinetic sculpture, intaglio printmaking, branding, UX/UI, and fabricated art objects.
A central through-line: objects that encode cultural or systems-level meaning through physical form. Her conceptual framing draws on a Dada → Situationist → Speculative Design lineage, rooted in her identity as a digital native.
Lewis holds a BFA from the University of Cincinnati DAAP and an A.A. in Applied Graphic Communication from UC Blue Ash College, where she received the Outstanding Applied Graphic Communication Graduate award. She lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Artist Statement
As a digital native, I see the Internet as a domestic partner I have known ever since I was able to type on a computer. Living with and through the Internet for the majority of my life, I have inadvertently taught the Cloud much about me — from the subtle nuances of my blogged personality to every one of my past residential addresses.
Despite the extensive personal file it holds, the Cloud remains an impersonal structure, dispersing its personality among bureaucratic agents like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Computers are not only mimicries of us, but we are, in effect, mimicries of computation — our cells act as individual Turing machines.
My work traverses cultural language and its connections to online space. I source materials from BidFTA auctions, liquidation sales, and found objects — not as anticapitalist critique, but as wry, opportunistic participation in the waste stream. I resist being categorized into a single discipline or medium. The art/commercial design divide is a productive ambiguity, not a problem.
Education
BFA — University of Cincinnati, DAAP (College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning)
A.A. in Applied Graphic Communication — UC Blue Ash College