Kate Warren is a photography-based queer artist, educator, and community organizer. Raised in Vermont and based in the Hudson Valley, her work explores self-performance, kinship, and intimacy as sites of resistance to inherited structures of repression. Drawing on archival materials, constructed scenes, and sculptural interventions, she reimagines personal and collective histories through a queer, feminist lens, making memory porous, speculative, and alive. She has exhibited at venues including Light Work, the California Museum of Photography, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has been recognized by American Photography, the Lucie Foundation, and the British Journal of Photography.

Working in collaboration with partners including Planned Parenthood, the Smithsonian, and The New York Times, she brings a trauma-informed approach to image-making.

Her practice extends beyond image-making to build interdependent creative communities rooted in mutual aid, including the Golden Kin artist retreat and Photo Buddies salon series in Hudson, NY. She has been the Syracuse Pride parade director for five years and serves on the OUT Hudson board of directors.

"I am an interdisciplinary artist exploring identity, belonging, and care through photography. Raised in a conservative Catholic family and closeted into adulthood, I approach queerness as a methodology that offers both liberation and alternative kinship. My trauma-informed artistic processes integrate experiences working in journalism, performance, and archival research to investigate how creative expressions of selfhood foster more expansive representations of gender, repression, and recognition between self, family, and community.

My work ruptures ties to oppressive norms and imagines other ways of being. Whether working collaboratively with others or using my own body, I stage masculinities and femininities in flux through costume, movement, and setting, treating gender as a continuous performance. Drawing from the aesthetics of my New England and Appalachian family's mid-century archives, I create cinematic and dreamlike scenes that press into the tensions of domestic life. Through the process of making work, I consider and foster conditions for belonging."