Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006.
Currently, Akashi has a major solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art entitled Formations. The exhibition will travel to the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Upcoming in September, Akashi will present a commission project at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. In 2020, Akashi had a solo exhibition of a commissioned sculpture, Cultivator, at the Aspen Art Museum and in 2017, she had a significant solo exhibition, Long Exposure, at SculptureCenter in New York.
Winner of the 2022 Art + Technology Lab Grant at LACMA, Akashi also received the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize and completed a residency at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other residencies include ARCH Athens, Greece (2019) and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019), both of which concluded with a solo exhibition.
Notable group exhibitions include Ground/work at the Clark Art Institute (2021), Possédé·e·s at MoCo Montpellier Contemporain, France (2021), Brave New Worlds, Palm Springs Art Museum (2019), Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); LA: A Fiction, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Take me (I’m Yours), Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015).
Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; CC Foundation, Shanghai; X Museum, Beijing; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others.