Kyna Leski is a Professor of Architecture at The Rhode Island School of Design who has served as Department Head, Graduate Director and Head of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome; as well as being a Visiting Professor at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. She has played a formative role in the beginning education for architecture students and students in Experimental and Foundational Studies. Leski is a founding principal of 3six0 Architecture, recently completing the Community Works Center. Leski’s design for a house of visual shadows was awarded first place out of 480 entries in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition. In addition to designing buildings, furniture and academic programs, Leski is an illustrator, animator and writer. Her book The Storm of Creativity, published by The MIT Press (2015) was translated into Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Korean. Penguin Random House published a paperback edition in 2020. She has spoken about the creative process from the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California to Pop!tech in Camden Maine; from Quito, Ecuador to Stockholm, Sweden to Seoul, Korea. Kyna is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Architecture and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2017 Leski was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from DesignxRI and was inducted into their Hall of Fame.
Dream House Generative Section
Graphite, colored pencil, phosphorescent paint, gum arabic on vellum 38 1/2 ”x 30” x 3/4” framed
Artist Statement
My work is dedicated to exploring, witnessing, and practicing the creative process. I have listened and observed its workings as a teacher, a student, a maker, a writer and a designer. Growing up, I witnessed my father design buildings from his drawings and sketches through to their realization and reception by the public to which they still belong. It was an education in process-to design-to architecture; the complicated relationship of stated intention to the eventual experience of the inhabitant — and the transubjectivity between. I live in a city whose name, (“pro-videre”) signifies what creativity is: a process of “seeing ahead.” We “see ahead” when we make designs that are materialized in the future, when we write problems that anticipate solutions, when we link one step to another in navigating our lives and the way through anything, especially the empty page, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, needs, and questions. As an educator I am dedicated to embodied learning, to the precision of mind that comes from measured making and to the clarity of abstraction. As an observer, I seek to learn something, to be surprised by the author’s soul voice and to find coherence where there wasn’t any. As a maker of things, designer, and writer, I dwell in uncertainty, follow poetry as a process, reason with material, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct — conceptual clarity appearing as a guide. The creative process is the story of this passage and speaks for the author, to the user, the reader, inhabitant, audience or viewer.
Additional Info
Artist Website: kynaleski.com
Instagram: @kynaleski
Part of Growing the NetWorks
This artist was selected by a past NetWorks Rhode Island participant as part of Growing the NetWorks — a 2025 exhibition presented by WaterFire Providence, at the WaterFire Arts Center, celebrating peer-nominated artists from across Rhode Island. Learn more at waterfire.org/growingthenetworks
Highlighting the work of selected artists who have played vital roles in shaping the contemporary visual arts community in Rhode Island. This collection of brief video portraits provides a window into the lives, practices, and cultural contributions of professional artists.
