Working with sound and environment as primary media, Kianga Ford’s narrative experiments query the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Her immersive, often story-based, installations engage the viewer in a participatory exploration of the limits between individual and collective, intimate and public, given and contingent, categorical and particular.

Her work has been shown at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Brooklyn Institute for Contemporary Art. Her recent solo shows include presentations of new work at Lisa Dent Gallery, San Francisco, and Occidental College, Los Angeles. Ford was one of thirty artists selected for the 2006 California Biennial, and her work is currently being featured in the groundbreaking show, Black Light White Noise, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Her explorations with narrative are informed by her studies in English and Theater at Georgetown University, where she received her B.A. in 1994, and post-graduate work in film at New York University. Ford received her M.F.A. in 2003 from the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is a doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is completing a dissertation on articulations of race and identity in contemporary exhibition. She lectures frequently on her dual-inquiry into questions of contemporary identity in discourse and practice and has recently spoken at the San Francisco Art Institute, MIT, Stanford, and USC.

In 2006, she was Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. Ford is Assistant Professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Boston.