Kristen Baumliér – Biography
View/Download .pdf of Baumlier Artist Bio
Kristen Baumliér’s work spans the full spectrum of interdisciplinary media, including performance, interactive installation, video and audio works. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1994, where she began utilizing humor, combined with interactive performance and installation as core elements in her work.
During a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2005, Baumliér began performing as the “The Petroleum Pop Princess” as a pop icon engaging viewers in debate over materialism and oil consumerism. Her first live show about energy issues, called Oh, Petroleum, was performed in venues in California, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio. On July 4, 2010 she released her album Deplete Me which features nine songs about conservation, energy, and petroleum.
She received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in 2004, and an ArtsLink project grant in 2005 to produce a site-specific collaborative work in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. Baumliér has performed at the Mattress Factory, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and at the Select Media Festival in Chicago, IL. Her videos have screened in New Zealand, Serbia, England, and in the U.S. and her work has shown at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OH, Hotcakes Gallery in Milwaukee, WI and the UNI Gallery of Art.
In 2009, Baumlier began researching food, health, technology, and food systems and developed the community project Food Font which comprised of fifteen live Food Font events where community members created food alphabets. Over 29 alphabets and 1500 letters were made for the project. The letters are free and available for anyone to use as jpeg files and as printables and have been used in classrooms, hospitals, farmers markets and in homes to promote discussion about food.
Baumlier’s current project is Bliss – Salt, Sugar and Fat which explores the use of photography and installation to show foods that make our brains “feel bliss” due to the salt, sugar, and fat in them. You can see examples of past and current work at www.kristenbaumlier.com and find her on twitter as @kbaumlier where she tweets about food, creativity, and social change.