Chelsea Harris

Chelsea Harris is a representational oil painter from Midwest America. After receiving her BFA in Painting from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2017, she served as Studio Programs Manager at the Speed Art Museum where she developed public programming in support of major exhibitions, including Promise, Witness, Remembrance (2020), and Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary (2022). Alongside her studio teaching and arts administration experience, Harris has published as a critical theory essayist and presented at museum professional conferences. She has maintained a studio practice consistently focused on portraiture for over a decade. After losing two close friends to the opioid crisis in 2019, her repeated depictions of them as her primary subjects became an exercise in processing grief where she considers her studio the site of a resuscitative act. This interpretation further evolved in the summer of 2024 following a period working with BreakThru Films Studio in Sopot, Poland, where she was introduced to the process of animation. Harris is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art, continuing a body of work that recounts the stories of a generation afflicted by psychiatric distress and substance abuse, painting from the perspective of an enraptured narrator.