Kim Anno

Kim Anno (born December 19, 1958) is an American painter, photographer, and filmmaker known for her work in abstraction, large-format photography, and experimental and documentary film. She has served as a professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco since 1996, and was chair of its painting department as of 2012. She is also the founder of Wild Projects, a social-practice arts nonprofit. In 2024 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2025 her first feature documentary, ¡Quba!, about the LGBTQ+ rights movement in Cuba, premiered at the Havana Film Festival New York.

Early life and education

Kim Anno was born in Los Angeles, California, to a Japanese-Polish father and a mother of mixed heritage; her father was a physicist and her mother a nurse and civil rights activist. She was raised near the ocean on the city's west side and has said she came of age amid the social and political movements of the 1970s, citing the era's mass gatherings as early influences on her work.

Anno earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in 1982 and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985.

Influences

In her introduction to the monograph Rebel Splendor: Kim Anno (2023), curator Alla Efimova described Anno as "a radical spirit who revels in the beauty of the world and its people," writing that across painting, experimental video, murals, social-practice projects, and documentary film, Anno combines outrage at injustice and environmental catastrophe with a persistent sense of magnificence. Efimova organized the volume around four aspects of Anno's practice: her work as a studio artist producing paintings, photographs, videos, and books; as a producer of large-scale events and an experimental filmmaker; as director of the feature documentary ¡Quba!; and as a mentor, activist, and social-practice artist, reflecting the degree to which Anno's work moves across these media rather than treating them as separate practices. John Zarobell, also writing in Rebel Splendor, has discussed Anno's use of flux as a recurring metaphor, technique, and subject across her ongoing film series Men and Women in Water Cities. Art historian Marci Kwon has traced a throughline in Anno's practice from her early formation as a feminist artist in Los Angeles to her 2022 artist residency at Stanford University, describing Anno's work as refusing a distinction between the art world and the world at large.

Recurring themes in her work include ecology and climate change, "the joy and consequences of technology," and the language of abstraction as it appears in religious and ritual art. Working on wood, aluminum, and canvas, she has pushed her painting practice toward the limits of abstraction, and has said she intends her abstract compositions to invite viewers to become participants, bringing their own experience to the interpretation of the work. Around 2008 her work began to incorporate narrative, which she has linked to her subsequent move into film, video installation, and large-format photography series.

Career

Early career and painting

Anno's early career included painting public murals, among them a 1989 mural project noted in the Oakland Tribune and a 1991 commission for the University of California, Davis, described in the Sacramento Bee as using mural-making as a means of conflict resolution on campus. Her paintings and photography were reviewed in the Peninsula Times Tribune as early as 1985 and, later, by critic Mark Van Proyen in Artweek following her exhibition at Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Teaching and commissions

According to Anno's curriculum vitae, her teaching appointments have included California College of Arts and Crafts/California College of the Arts (associate professor of painting, 1996 to present, with an earlier lectureship in design in 1990 to 1991); the University of California, Berkeley (visiting lecturer in painting, drawing, and design, 1992 to 1996); Stanford University (visiting lecturer, 1994 to 1995); the San Francisco Art Institute (visiting artist, 1993 to 1996); California State University, Hayward (lecturer, 1994); Louisiana State University (assistant professor, 1990 to 1991); Ohio State University (lecturer, 1989 to 1990); Cabrillo College (instructor, 1987 to 1989); and Napa Valley College (instructor, 1985 to 1986). The 1992 to 1994 University of California, Berkeley appointment is independently confirmed in her 1992 Oakland Tribune profile.

Filmmaking

Beginning around 2009, after two decades as a painter, Anno began making short films, developing an interdisciplinary, largely experimental body of work that includes the Men and Women in Water Cities series, comprising Water City, Durban (2012), Water City, Berkeley (2014), and Water City, Ipswich (2019), screened internationally at venues including the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, Kala Art Institute, the New Media Festival in Seoul, and the University of Suffolk, among others. Reviewing Water City, Berkeley for Daily Serving, critic John Zarobell discussed its staging as a video installation and live performance at Kala Art Institute.

The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Havana Film Festival New York. Film Threat and High on Films also reviewed it favorably, and it holds a positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. Writing for Cinema Crazed, Emillie Black praised Roberto Chile's cinematography and the film's pacing, and Victor Pineyro of Seventh Art Studio described the film as illuminating tensions between personal freedom and ideological structure in Cuba. In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Anno said the film was the first of her projects conceived from the outset as a straightforward documentary, in contrast to her earlier, more experimental short films. 2022: Holt Resident Artist, Stanford University Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award, for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Honolulu Academy of Arts; the Eureka Foundation Fleishhacker Fellowship, with accompanying exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum; and further fellowships and awards from the Open Circle Foundation and the Berkeley Film Foundation Additional awards and fellowships listed in Anno's CV include the Henry Luce Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Robertson Family Fund, the Zellerbach Foundation, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation

Selected exhibitions and screenings

Drawn from Anno's curriculum vitae, unless otherwise noted:

2024: GODZILLA: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York 2023: Animals' Reading Room, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco, with accompanying monograph 2022: Spectacle of Nature, Coulter Gallery, Stanford University 2021: Long Arc of Day, public glass mural commission, San Francisco International Airport 2019: Nature Studies, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco 2012: Water City, Durban, Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg 2009: Liquescent, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco 2005: Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship exhibition, Berkeley Art Museum 1999: Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art

Selected filmography

Per Anno's filmography document:

2011: Men and Women in Water Cities, Chapter One (14 min) 2012: Water City, Durban (6 min) 2014: Water City, Berkeley (25 min) 2017: Canto One (5 min), animation with Charles Woodman 2019: Water City, Ipswich (5 min), United Kingdom 2021: H/our Breath (5 min) 2023: Signs (7 min), collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco 2025: ¡Quba! (71 min), feature documentary

Publications

Anno, Kim, with Anne Carson. The Mirror of Simple Souls (2003), limited-edition letterpress book, St. Benedict's Press, Minnesota. Anno, Kim, with Anne Carson. The Albertine Work Out (2014), artist's book, St. Ben's Literary Arts Institute, Minnesota. Anno, Kim. Rebel Splendor, monograph edited by Alla Efimova, Anglim/Trimble Gallery (2023). Anno, Kim, ed. Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe. "Queer Traveler," in Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, University of Washington Press (2015).