Andrew Kensett

Position
Department of Art & Archaeology
Bio/Description

Andrew Kensett is a doctoral student studying photography in the 20th-century United States. He is particularly interested in the practice of abstraction in postwar photographic art and the porous borders it shared with photojournalism and documentary photography, scientific imaging, and avant-garde painting. Kensett holds a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.A. from the Graduate Program in the history of art at Williams College and the Clark Art Institute. His qualifying paper at Williams and the Clark focused on the work of the photographer Edward Steichen, identifying an undercurrent of the figural and the bodily persisting in Steichen’s early experiments in photographic abstraction.

During his time as a master’s student, Kensett was a graduate intern in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper at the Clark and a recipient of the Judith M. Lenett Memorial Fellowship in Conservation at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. Before graduate school, he served as curatorial assistant in photography at Phoenix Art Museum and as assistant curator at the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography. Kensett was the 2021–22 McCrindle Intern in photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. His studies at Princeton have been supported by a George S. Heyer Graduate Fellowship in American/Modern Art History.

Person Category
PhD Students