Katarina Weslien is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her work takes form in cross-media installations, collaborative efforts, textile constructions, and print media. She builds her projects through layers of research with a particular interest in how images and objects elicit thoughts, emotions, and embodied knowledge. She is interested in moments of radical transformation, the place where one thing can quickly become something else. The space where the known becomes the strange and where dislocation of what we know presents an unfamiliar familiarity. Her belief in the power of simple embodied gestures, subtle shifts, nuance, magnification, hesitation, and gaps all have the potential to become tools for a space of engagement.
Weslien received her BFA in Textiles and from Utah State University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She is the former editor of the Moth Press at the Maine College of Art, where she was also the director of graduate studies. More recently, she has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also co-led study trips to India that focus on material culture and pilgrimage studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Payson Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission. Her work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, among others. Originally from Sweden, she now lives on Peaks Island and works in Portland, Maine.