Phoebe Kuo (b. 1983, Lompoc, CA)
Pronunciation: “quo”
she/her
Phoebe Kuo is a design researcher and studio woodworker who makes site-specific sculpture using traditional furnituremaking techniques. Her work engages the built environment to propose alternative relationships and systems of value. Born in California to Taiwanese-American mathematicians, she grew up navigating hybrid identities, which she continues to explore as a queer artist of color.
Her work has been shown at Chautauqua Institute, New York; FLXST Contemporary, Chicago, Illinois; Wasserman Projects, Detroit, Michigan; and ICFF, New York, New York, among others. She has been awarded residencies through ACRE Projects, Field/Work at Chicago Artists Coalition, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; as a craft researcher, she jointly received an Exhibition Research Grant from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC, for a collaborative book project on women in woodworking.
For a decade she consulted as a design ethnographer for Fortune 500 companies, and has conducted research in China, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and the United States. She has taught design thinking at Stanford University and Northwestern University, and woodworking in San Francisco, Detroit, Tennessee, and Maine.
She received her MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a certificate in Fine Woodworking from The Krenov School, and her BS in Product Design from Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, CA, with her wife, toddler, and two house rabbits.
Get in touch for collaborations, commissions, or just to say hello!