Kate Castelli is an artist living and working in Somerville, Massachusetts. She earned her BFA from the Art Institute of Boston (AIB). She received her MFA in printmaking and book arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). She is currently an associate professor and department chair of the Illustration and Visual Narratives program at Lesley Art and Design (LA+D) in Cambridge, Mass. When not making, teaching, or thinking about art, Castelli can be found happily wandering the city. She is rarely without a sketchbook, frequently haunts used bookstores, and is hopelessly addicted to coffee.
Castelli’s studio practice exists at an intersection of books, prints, and works on paper that explore poetic and formal juxtapositions in order to connect what cannot be connected. There are narrative threads that run throughout her work: traveling and the desire to be elsewhere, cities, fragments, and glimpses of moments that need to be recorded or remembered. Much of her work begins with ephemera and found paper rather than the daunting blank white page. This found paper has a subtlety that new paper lacks, but more importantly it has a memory and a history. She edits, alters, and adds to this history through traditional and experimental printmaking, mark making, and collage.