Astrid Kensinger

Director

Education City, Qatar

https://qatar.vcu.edu/graphicdesign

Astrid Kensinger is the Chair of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts in Qatar. Originally from San Francisco, most of Astrid’s industry, practice and teaching have been outside of the States. This global exposure and consistent exploration of culture and identity have shaped her teaching and practice significantly.

Her personal practice interweaves information visualization with performance art through cartographic site-specific actions where she incarnates visual anthropology and intangible heritage of lo­cation with co-presence, walks, and mapping. She is particularly drawn to acts of endurance.

Astrid’s most recent research collaborations have included Dengue fever outbreak solutions (Skoll Foundation, Epihack Colombo, Sri Lanka), mapping and preserving endangered languages of Asia (DIHA: Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia) and mapping historical language migration in South East Asia (archeolinguistics).

Her Industry experience includes being Media & Design Manager for the American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo, Japan, as well as the Art Director for the American Club in Japan. She has created identity systems for Sustainability in Singapore, Political organizations in Europe, Arts festivals in America, and has web reported for music festivals in Japan. Much of Astrid’s industry work focuses on events, governmental policies, sustainability and/or cultural heritage.

Astrid has exhibited and presented internationally in solo and group shows, juried exhibitions and conferences in the USA, UK, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Cyprus, Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore, and more recently within the self-curated space of Facebook. Before coming to Qatar, she was at QUT (Australia) and NTU (Singapore). She has lectured at London College of Communication, Central St Martins, Ravensbourne College, University of Brighton and University College for the Creative Arts at Epsom as well as Tama Art University in Tokyo. She holds an MFA with honors, in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College.