Katelyn Kopenhaver (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work moves between printmaking, photography, video and performance. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and is based in Miami, Florida where she is a studio resident at Bakehouse Art Complex. She has received the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (2021) and the Miami Individual Artists Grant (2024). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Netflix documentaries and Der Greif Issue 18 curated by Hank Willis Thomas. Forthcoming exhibitions include the Every Woman Biennial 2026 at Pen + Brush (New York, NY) and F*ck Art at the Museum of Sex (Miami, FL).

Kopenhaver creates encounters that earn trust before disrupting it. Borrowing the visual and behavioral logic of systems she interrogates, including persuasion, deception and power, she deploys manipulation as method to produce situations that feel plausible and familiar before revealing their instability. Her work asks viewers to recognize how belief forms, how forgetting, distraction and speed function as implication, and what it means to return to what has been conditioned out of view. Using her own body as a site of enactment and titles as delayed triggers, her work centers moments of belated recognition rather than resolution.

When did you decide to trust this?