About

We are Kyndred Arts & Culture, Kentucky-based, artist‑led organization that nurtures creative community at the crossroads of experience, culture,
and place.

We translate local creative, visionary, and critical thinking into programs for arts education, community building, and professional development – centering universal design, collective care, and radical belonging to expands opportunities to all Kentuckians to connect, thrive, and shape a more inclusive cultural future.

Our Founding Principles

  • Grounding our collective in Kentucky is a deliberate act of love—for each other, for this land, and for the layered histories of resistance and creativity that shape this region.

    From Indigenous survivance and Black freedom movements to Appalachian labor organizing and queer rural life, Kentucky holds powerful legacies. We create in conversation with these intersecting lineages—through storytelling, embodiment, and artwork that reflects deep solidarity with our human and more-than-human kin.

  • At Kyndred, we believe thriving doesn't happen in isolation — it grows in relationship, in community, and through shared commitment. We draw inspiration from Mia Mingus’s vision of access intimacy — a deep, mutual sense of trust, connection, and ease. A kind of intimacy that doesn’t come from forced closeness, but from spaces where all parts of us are welcome.

    Kyndred is a space for queer, neurodivergent artists to live fully in our depth, creativity, and complexity. Together, we cultivate rhythms of collective care that honor both interdependence and autonomy. We know that for many neurodivergent people, solitude is restoration. Time alone is vital for regulation, reflection, and healing. At Kyndred, we honor the need for space as much as the need for connection.

    This is community as practice: tender, intentional, and ever-evolving. We come together in ways that make room for complexity, slowness, and care.

  • Art is the heart of our collective. It’s how we connect, how we heal, how we resist, and how we imagine new worlds into being.

    Our creative work draws from liberatory lineages. We are indebted to the predominantly BIPOC, Queer, and Disabled visionary thinkers who developed these frameworks:

    • Neuroqueer theory

    • Intersectional feminism

    • Disability justice

    • Embodied activism

    • Emergent strategy

    • Kinship worldviews


    We move through these liberatory frameworks like roots — intertwining and finding nourishment in collective growth.

  • For us, liberation isn’t a destination—it’s a creative rhythm.

    A slow, intentional, cyclical process of:

    • Unlearning oppression

    • Deepening self-awareness

    • Living authentically

    • Sustaining one another through access, care, and cultural creation

  • By rooting our work in Kentucky, we affirm that liberatory futures are not abstract — they are already emerging here. Our presence here joins broader movements of artists, organizers, culture-bearers, and community-builders who also know that change begins in relationship, in practice, and in place.

    Together, we’re composting harm, seeding joy, and cultivating futures where we not only survive, but thrive. Like a rhizome, we grow in unexpected directions — resilient, abundant, and alive.

Frequently
Asked Questions

  • Our name reflects who we are: “KY” for Kentucky, “ND” for neurodivergent, and “kindred” for the spirit of kinship that guides us.

    We believe in a world where creativity, connection, and care are central. We celebrate difference as strength and art as a shared practice of joyful resistance.

    Kyndred is not just a name — it’s a living network of people rooted in place, growing together, supporting one another, and reimagining what community can be.

  • Kentucky has always been a place of resistance, resourcefulness, and radical creativity. We are joining this legacy, and forging a future on our own terms — starting right here, in the midst of ongoing partisan hostility and cultural erasure.

    We root ourselves intentionally in this place — not just geographically, but relationally, historically, and imaginatively.

    Grounding our collective in Kentucky is a commitment to one another, to the stories we carry, and to the layered histories of resistance and creativity that shape this region. From Black freedom movements and Appalachian labor organizing to Indigenous survivance and queer rural life, Kentucky holds powerful legacies of refusal and renewal. These lineages live in the land and in our bodies. We engage them through our own embodied resistance, collective creation, and deep solidarity with our human and more-than-human kin.

    By rooting our work here, we affirm that liberatory futures are already taking shape — cultivated by those who came before us and by those building now. Our presence joins a broader, ongoing movement of artists, organizers, land stewards, culture-bearers, and everyday people who know that transformation begins at home — in relationship and in practice.

    Our work draws from liberatory frameworks developed and led by Black, Indigenous, and other people of color — particularly queer, trans, non-binary, and disabled visionaries. These include intersectional feminism, disability justice, embodied activism, emergent strategy, kinship worldviews, and neuroqueer theory — whose roots intertwine with these broader movements for justice. We move through these lineages like roots, drawing nourishment from their wisdom and growing toward collective flourishing.