Katelyn Kopenhaver (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between public intervention, performance, text, and lens-based practices. She interrogates dynamics of trust — asking not who or what we trust, but how and why. Kopenhaver 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), and her work has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Der Greif Issue 18, curated by Hank Willis Thomas. Current 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 will be an artist-in-residence at SOMA in Mexico City later this year.

Her current project, What Is Behind a Smile?, pairs her own image with those of polarizing public women — Marie Antoinette, Ghislaine Maxwell, Hillary Clinton, and others — examining how collective judgment reduces complex figures to fixed images, and how the smile becomes a site of automatic trust.