
Kathleen McDermott is an interdisciplinary artist and technology designer with a background in installation, prop-making and sculpture. She combines her knowledge of fabrication with open source hardware to build a language of absurdity that merges new media, design, performance, and video––to process, examine and provide alternative models of life with ubiquitous computing technologies on the body and in the home.
She received a BFA from Cornell University, MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong and Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, The Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, the Wende Museum in LA, and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; and has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Dezeen. She received a Brookly Arts Council Grant in 2024. In addition to her artistic practice, she is an advocate for accessible technology education who actively seeks opportunities to give workshops, collaborate with community partners, and shares tutorials for working with DIY electronics.
McDermott has served as a co-PI on two NSF grants focused on creative STEM learning contexts, specifically dance, and alongside collaborators in Steinhardt, has developed Dancebits, an accessible toolkit for prototyping wearable costumes. She is also interested in hardware sustainability; she received an NYU Green Grant to research solar solutions for wearables in learning contexts in 2020, archived at https://www.idmwearables.club/ and in 2025 mounted a show at Open Source Gallery centered on electronics repair and reuse.