
Hello
Jasa McKenzie is a curator and artist based between Kassel, Germany and Minneapolis, Minnesota.As a queer curator, she is driven by issues of identity, equality, and social justice. She upholds an art and artist-driven outlook while applying an interdisciplinary approach to curating. Her drive is to give artists a voice, especially under-represented artists, emerging artists, queer artists, women artists, and those practicing outside of major art centers. She is a global curator with ample experience working with artists from six continents, maintaining close working realationships, and producing ambitious projects across geographies. Her art historical research includes a wide range of contemporary arts such as postinternet, performing arts, feminism, global contemporary, and public art. She holds particular interest in blending experimental music and sound art into hybrid visual projects.
She obtained her master's degree in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She then provided curatorial support to the Desert X 2019 and Desert X 2021 exhibitions in the Coachella Valley of California. During that time, she has been a recipient of a grant from the CALI Accelerator Program. In 2021, she also became a member of the board for the Catacomb Collective, a performing arts organization in Minneapolis. Since 2018, she has been the creator and cohost of the contemporary art podcast SOTA: State of the Arts, from which spawned SOTA Projects, an initiative of pop-up exhibitions and performances such as IDENTITY//SINGULARITY and Terraforming. She was the recipient of the first-place proposal to the 2017-2018 Apexart Franchise Exhibition Program, resulting in a fully-funded exhibition in Japan that focused on the subject of Mental Illness, titled Absences, along with public programming. She was also a Fulbright semi-finalist in 2018 for a feminist-driven research proposal in Germany. She curated multiple exhibitions while in New York, including My-O-My (2017), The Map Is Not the Territory (co-curated, 2017), and her graduate thesis Femmexplicit Digitalia (2018), which explored explicit womxn’s corporeality as a source of power in post internet culture.
Hailing from South Dakota, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and German from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked in a variety of non-profit art spaces and museums, while maintaining her own art practice and exhibitions.