Anna Kristensen (b. 1983) lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC, and teaches Painting and Drawing at CUNY Queens College. She received an MFA in Sydney, Australia at the University of New South Wales Art & Design, with a year of postgraduate study at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany.

Using painting and sculpture, Kristensen brings careful attention to moments that might easily go unseen. She comes across these moments while walking – a sunlit wrought-iron fence, a reflection on a sidewalk, an open worksite gate. In oil or turns of glass, her work lays bare the subtle conditions and assumptions that quietly construct our perspectives. Her exhibitions form constellations of photorealist paintings, extending their formal poetics into the viewer’s own physical space through a dialogue with the body, architecture, and sculpture – more recently sculptures made in glass. Each show is an open network for reflection upon the conditions of painting itself (texture, light, perspective) and a heightened awareness of the physical, emotional and psychological act of looking.

From 2009-2016 Anna was a lecturer at the University of New South Wales Art & Design (Australia), and taught Painting at Rutgers, Newark (USA) 2019-2021 with Jordan Casteel. She has exhibited internationally and extensively across Australia with work in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Artbank, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, University of Western Australia, Murray Art Museum Albury and Shepparton Art Museum. Residencies include the Australia Council Greene St Studio (New York City), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, (Omaha, NE), Art OMI (New York), Art Gallery of NSW Denise Hickey studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France). Her 2020 solo exhibition ‘Set’, at Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR) was developed on residency at the Vermont Studio Center and Mass MoCA. Anna is represented by The Commercial, Sydney.