Amber Kempthorn explores time and nostalgia through drawing. She is a graduate of Hiram College, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she received her MFA in Sculpture in 2008. Her work has been exhibited regionally and nationally and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and most recently in More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art at the Akron Art Museum.
In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support the creation of her animation project, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley. Ordinary Magic visually translates British composer Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes into hand-drawn, familiar scenes from Northeast Ohio. In partnership with the Akron Symphony Orchestra, Kempthorn’s animation will premiere with live accompaniment in October 2022.
Kempthorn is an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Art & Art History at The College of Wooster and holds a Lecturer position in the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art where she was awarded the Dan Tranberg Teaching Excellence Award in the spring of 2022.