Kristen Kreider is a writer and artist situated at a crossover of poetry, art and architecture. She works collaboratively with architect James O'Leary to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. Kreider + O'Leary are currently completing a large-scale project and related monograph, Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2025), exploring four situations globally where communities have formed amidst social and political turbulence. Having previously held Professorships in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and University of Oxford, Kristen is now Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

See: http://www.kreider-oleary.net

Kristen's research stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialization as form, and a concern with how artworks relate to the world. On the one hand, this research results in a body of poetry, art-writing and academic writing - including the monograph Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Signs, Subject and Sites (IB Tauris, 2014) - that employs various forms, modes and genres to open up and communicate meaning. On the other hand, this research results in practice-led research outputs of performance, installation and video work produced in collaboration with architect James O’Leary.

Combining aspects of performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction and image-making, the work of Kreider + O'Leary exposes and interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. They have made work in response to prisons, military sites, film locations, landscape gardens, desert environments, urban districts and gallery contexts both in the UK and internationally. Their work has been shown at venues including Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy as well as in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Istanbul Biennial. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press and Field Poetics by Ma Bibliothèque.

Kreider + O’Leary are currently completing a large-scale project, Ungovernable Spaces, that includes a series of works (performance, installation, film) developed in relation to situations wherein communities have formed amidst social and political turbulence. These situations include the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominantly African American occupants; M.K. Gandhi’s practices of social activism including the Salt March protest of 1930, daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical pedagogical experiment started by a poet and an architect in Valparaíso, Chile in 1970; and, finally, the urban ecologies developing on either side of Belfast's ‘peace walls’ in the wake of the Troubles and 1998's Good Friday Agreement.

Understanding this formation of community in terms of ‘ungovernability’ and a ‘poetics of resistance’, the monograph relating to this project, Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2025), charts a movement from oppression, through transformation, into imagining, and finally emergence. Structured via four spatial configurations – the grid, the charkha, the constellation, and the cluster – each case study explores community formation through artistic and aesthetic practices that resist and unsettle forms of hegemonic order. Working at the intersection of poetry, art and spatial practice, Ungovernable Spaces argues for the importance of ethics, aesthetics, imagination and ecology in developing, of necessity, a new poetics of ‘us.’ In doing so, it demonstrates how the formation of community in and through resistance has the potential to introduce new models of social and cultural interaction that make something new, something different, something unknown of the world.

Kreider + O'Leary's forthcoming project is entitled Flowering.

Throughout her career as a writer, artist, researcher and educator, Kristen has worked to promote a rigorous dialogue between creative and critical practice in contemporary art and to encourage an interdisciplinary, socially engaged approach to contemporary poetry and poetics.

In her early role as Reader in Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London - also Director of the Practice-based PhD Programme across Departments of English, Drama and Performance, Music, and Media - Kristen taught poetry and poetic practice at BA and MA level and supervised PhDs in poetry and creative-critical writing. From there, Kristen held Professorships in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, where was Director of the MPhil/PhD Art Programme and made a Mountain of Art Research (MARs) as both platform and ethos, and at the University of Oxford, where she led the Ruskin School of Art.

Currently, Kristen is Head of the Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art where she works to support and promote the development of innovative art research across a range of artistic and interdisciplinary practices. Committed to rigorous formal experimentation, maverick conceptual exploration and socially-engaged articulation, Kristen supports the development of artistic research that is both personal and political; that emphasises the material ‘stuff’ of art as much as its speculative possibilities. As a supervisor, Kristen particularly welcomes proposals engaging in situated research methodologies and related modes of writing and art-making to explore questions and problems pressing for 'now'.

See: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/study/mphil-phd/