Adele Yiseol Kenworthy
Adele 이슬 Kenworthy (she/they) is a 1.5 generation Korean American artist-organizer. Her work centers the AANHPI femme experience, exploring what gestures and rituals we hold onto as sites of comfort and resistance during occupation and war—through participatory performance, sculpture, and photographic archives. Using organic, ephemeral materials— cut florals and fruits—she transforms embodied gestures of care into sculptural forms and durational performances, each a living monument to resilience and counter-memories existing in public.
She is a recipient of the 2025-26 Virginia Museum of Fine Art Visual Arts Professional Fellowship and the Wherewithal Research Grant managed by the Washington Project for the Arts and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.She participated in Transformer Gallery’s 19th Exercises for Emerging Artists program and has held residencies at Washington Project for the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington Innovation Studio, the Torpedo Factory Arts Center, and the Elizabeth Murrary Family Residency (upcoming August 2026). Their work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Transformer, Rhizome, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and American University (Washington, D.C.); Brentwood Arts Exchange and Towson University’s Asian Arts and Culture Center (Maryland); Bond Millen Gallery (Richmond, VA); and Art Basel Miami (Florida).
Kenworthy holds her MFA in Social Practice Art with a focus in public policy from the Corcoran School of Arts and Design at George Washington University, receiving the 2022 Outstanding MFA Award. Their past DC community organizing collaborators include Empower DC, Chinatown Arts Studio, 411 Collective, and Rising Organizers. In 2023, she gave birth to her daughter, was in a group exhibition at the DCCAH gallery, and worked with Monument Lab’s project management team on Beyond Granite: Pulling Together—the first outdoor art exhibition on the National Mall. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, District Fray, Bmore Art, Washingtonian, NBCWashington, and Fox45 Baltimore. She lives and works on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people, in the Washington, D.C metro area.
