July 2026
Kat Thompson
Kat Thompson (b. 1991) is a lens-based artist and educator based in Virginia. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, video, textiles, sculptural collage, and installation. Through layering and material juxtaposition, she examines how images and objects function as vessels for memory, history, and identity, with a particular focus on the African Diaspora. Her work considers the construction of Black selfhood, exploring how cultural memory, ancestral inheritance, and lived experience converge across personal and collective narratives. Thompson has presented solo exhibitions at 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), Hamiltonian Artists (Washington, D.C.), and George Mason University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Mid-Atlantic and southern United States, including Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA), Visible Records (Charlottesville, VA), Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Reston, VA), and Green Space Miami. She has participated in residencies at The Watermill Center, MASS MoCA, the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), the Torpedo Factory Post-Graduate Residency, and the VisArts Gibbs Street Residency. She is a 2023–2025 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow. Thompson holds an MFA in Photography & Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography from George Mason University. During the TILT residency, Thompson will work on Soft Monuments Continued. Through photography and archival materials, the project investigates how tourism reshapes narratives of violence and displacement, using land as a portrait of marginalized communities and a repository of diasporic memory, perception, and lived experience. This iteration of Soft Monuments Continued will include Philadelphia’s landscapes as sites of obscured histories, conveying both the materiality of the subject and the project’s conceptual framework through large-scale prints.
