DeAnna Skedel has been an artist and professor in Kansas City since 2002. Her eclectic studio practice is deeply intuitive—akin to cooking: a meditation, an infusion, and a slow maceration of ideas and materials.

She began exhibiting at the Ohio Craft Museum while still an undergraduate. Graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago expanded her practice into theater and international opportunities, including the US/UK Contemporary Cast Iron in Sculpture Project in England, Overflow/Fluids (LA Art Girls) at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and a native garden project in Voulx, France. In Kansas City, she has been an Avenue of the Arts recipient, participated in the Urban Culture Project, and was featured in The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum. She has also been active in the Kansas City chapter of the social justice organization Avodah.

A committed educator, Skedel received the Missouri Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Metropolitan Community College–Blue River, where students affectionately describe her as “some crazy combination of Mr. Miyagi and Bob Ross.”

Reflecting on her overlapping roles as artist, educator, and parent of teens who learn and experience the world differently, she writes:
“It feels like I am in a kind of puberty of maturity—an acceleration of personal and artistic evolution beneath layers of responsibility and societal invisibility.”

She cherishes the creative pause, seeing it as a space to reflect on matriarchal wisdom and the lessons passed down through generations.