Selena Kimball grew up beside Acadia National Park in Maine, where her family’s farm was taken by eminent domain. She cuts into the printed record itself: newspaper front pages, military documentation, the engravings in explorers’ accounts. Her practice belongs to collage’s democratic tradition, in which household scissors cut a business suit down into a family quilt, or snip the morning’s headlines to paste them out of order into a notebook. The work ranges across photomontage, painting, sculpture, and installation.​

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Her recent work dismantles first editions of Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations (1856), a book said to have sat beside the Bible in American homes. In Atlas of Air, she cuts the empty sky out of New York Times front-page photographs of fire, flood, and war; her essay on the series appears in Post-Pandemic Imaginaries (Bloomsbury, in press). She has made two collage novels, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks and The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz, with the writer Agnieszka Taborska. With the anthropologist Alyssa Grossman, she is developing a parafictional catalogue of an ethnographic museum’s rock collection, its stones remade from discarded packaging.

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Her work has been shown at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, and reproduced in Harper’s Magazine. It has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and she has been interviewed in BOMB. Kimball is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and has received fellowships and residencies from the Rauschenberg Foundation, MacDowell, the Arctic Circle, NYSCA/NYFA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Asian Cultural Council. She is represented by Ulterior Gallery, New York, and divides her time between Maine and New York, where she is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art Practice at Parsons, The New School.

Curriculum Vitae  [Link]

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