Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences to create work that examines process and accumulation.
Her exhibitions include the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, Canada), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), Western Front (Vancouver), Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), ISEA 2006 (San Jose, California), ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge (San Jose, California), Yerba Buena Centre (San Francisco, California), Interactive Futures: The New Screen (Victoria, Canada), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta), and Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey).
She has lectured and held workshops at venues including the Tate Britain, Banff New Media Institute, the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies (Iowa City, Iowa), and Time’s Up (Linz, Austria).
As the founding Director of Upgrade Vancouver she has produced talks, screenings, exhibitions and symposia at the intersection of art and technology since 2003. Upgrade Vancouver was the first satellite node in the Upgrade International network that has spread, since its inception in 1999, to include 30 cities. Upgrade! International collaborates to produce exhibitions and gatherings, such as New York (Eyebeam Atelier 2005), Oklahoma City (Untitled Art Space, Oklahoma 2006), Skopje (Museum of the City of Skopje, Macedonia, 2008) and which will be held in Sao Paolo in 2010. In 2006, 2007 and 2008 Armstrong convened ArtCamp, an unconference devoted to hybrid fields between art, design and media.
Armstrong works collaboratively in the field of public art with Innes Yates, Marc Baumgartner, and the award-winning architecture and design team at bnode and with that team has been shortlisted for several high profile public art commissions in 2005-2006 including the public art commission at 1 Kingsway in Vancouver, BC, and the Arts Activation Team Master Plan at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport in San Jose, California.
She has written for P.S.1/MoMa, SubTerrain Magazine, TrAce, Year Zero One, the Kootenay School of Writing, and The Thing, as well as for catalogue publications and in 2002 published a book of critical theory (Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture) with Michigan State University Press.
Armstrong received a primary degree in French language and literature from L’Institut Paul Valéry at the Université de Montpellier in France and studied film and television at the University of Glasgow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts, Honours, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with a dual concentration in philosophy and film studies, and was granted a Masters of Philosophy in Humanities at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
From 2005-2008 she taught at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology in the Faculty of Applied Science at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British Columbia. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
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