Born in Indiana, Kyra Schmidt is a visual artist currently based in Portland, Maine. She received her Bachelors at the University of Southern Indiana, and her MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Kyra currently teaches adjunct photography and art history, and is head retoucher for Jason Schmidt Studio out of NYC.
Schmidt’s work follows a historic lineage of landscape photographers, while rejecting traditional methods in favor of experimentation and ephemerality. The artist creates luscious abstract artworks that prioritize the artist’s hand, performance, and the land as central to creating images as evocative suggestions of time and place. Her work attempts to transcribe the space between the sensation of being-in-the-world and our representations of it, often grappling with the discontinuity between image, text, meaning and physical experience.
Kyra has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; The House of Lucie, Los Angelas, CA; Candela Gallery, Richmond, VA; Edition One, Santa Fe, NM; Gallery 621, Tallahassee, FL; the Lushui Photography Festival, Lishui, China. Her work as been published in Aint-Bad Magazine, BETA Developments in Photography, and as a 2017 Top 50 Photographer by Critical Mass. Kyra’s first handmade monograph published with Dust Collective in Fall 2019.