J—KASPER
Jeff Kasper is an artist, writer, and educator.
His artistic practice brings together design, community education, and social engagement to create public artworks, installations, audio storytelling, workshops, publications, and participatory formats; using these elements to invite reflection, relationship-building, and serious play.
Informed by personal and collective experiences of disability, his projects explore how people navigate social support, proximity, and care in everyday life. Kasper is interested in how design can make tangible the often-unspoken negotiations people engage in around distance, connection, trust, vulnerability, and safety.
Arts Leadership
Kasper sustains an active career centering creative direction, public programming, and facilitation for arts & culture, government, and social services. This involves graphic design, strategic planning, and developing initiatives for outreach, mental health and wellbeing, accessibility, professional development, and artist services.
Recently, he was a Table of Voices member at Museum of Fine Arts Boston consulting with the Access and Inclusion Department on how to meaningfully engage disability culture and community throughout museum programs and exhibitions. Kasper is a committee member for Open Door Gallery at Worcester Art Museum, a gallery and studio that serves artists with disabilities, created in partnership with Open Door Arts.
He is also Executive Board Member for More Art, a NYC-based public art non-profit, where he previously served as Director of Engagement.
Exhibitions & Projects
Kasper recently premiered a new commission Inside Voices with Tufts University Art Galleries and John Michael Kohler Art Center (2025). His ongoing project wrestling embrace (2017-present) was recently presented as part of In Feeling: Empathy and Tension Through Disability at The Fralin Museum of Art (2025) and will tour to different intitutions through 2029.
In 2021-2022, he exhibited a two public art commissions in New York City Parks with ArtBridge and Meta Open Arts. Past solo projects have included Give & Take Care at Downtown Art (2019) and Boundary Objects at University of Massachusetts Herter Art Gallery (2020).
He contributed to Don’t Mind If I Do with Finnegan Shannon at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2023) which has since traveled to University Library at California State University, Sacramento (2024) and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2025), and Smith College Museum of Art (2026).
Kasper curated the series Access/Points: Approaches to Disability Arts at CUE Art Foundation (2017-2018), and participated in keynotes, podcasts, and panel discussions at Brooklyn Museum, BRIC, Inclusive Arts Vermont, Berklee Insitute for Accessible Arts Education, Queens Museum, and The 8th Floor, among others.
His artistic practice brings together design, community education, and social engagement to create public artworks, installations, audio storytelling, workshops, publications, and participatory formats; using these elements to invite reflection, relationship-building, and serious play.
Informed by personal and collective experiences of disability, his projects explore how people navigate social support, proximity, and care in everyday life. Kasper is interested in how design can make tangible the often-unspoken negotiations people engage in around distance, connection, trust, vulnerability, and safety.
Arts Leadership
Kasper sustains an active career centering creative direction, public programming, and facilitation for arts & culture, government, and social services. This involves graphic design, strategic planning, and developing initiatives for outreach, mental health and wellbeing, accessibility, professional development, and artist services.
Recently, he was a Table of Voices member at Museum of Fine Arts Boston consulting with the Access and Inclusion Department on how to meaningfully engage disability culture and community throughout museum programs and exhibitions. Kasper is a committee member for Open Door Gallery at Worcester Art Museum, a gallery and studio that serves artists with disabilities, created in partnership with Open Door Arts.
He is also Executive Board Member for More Art, a NYC-based public art non-profit, where he previously served as Director of Engagement.
Exhibitions & Projects
Kasper recently premiered a new commission Inside Voices with Tufts University Art Galleries and John Michael Kohler Art Center (2025). His ongoing project wrestling embrace (2017-present) was recently presented as part of In Feeling: Empathy and Tension Through Disability at The Fralin Museum of Art (2025) and will tour to different intitutions through 2029.
In 2021-2022, he exhibited a two public art commissions in New York City Parks with ArtBridge and Meta Open Arts. Past solo projects have included Give & Take Care at Downtown Art (2019) and Boundary Objects at University of Massachusetts Herter Art Gallery (2020).
He contributed to Don’t Mind If I Do with Finnegan Shannon at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2023) which has since traveled to University Library at California State University, Sacramento (2024) and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2025), and Smith College Museum of Art (2026).
Kasper curated the series Access/Points: Approaches to Disability Arts at CUE Art Foundation (2017-2018), and participated in keynotes, podcasts, and panel discussions at Brooklyn Museum, BRIC, Inclusive Arts Vermont, Berklee Insitute for Accessible Arts Education, Queens Museum, and The 8th Floor, among others.
Teaching & Engaged Scholarship
Kasper is Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst where he is a Dialogue Facilitation Fellow with the Intergroup Dialogue Initiative and associate of the Institute for Diversity Sciences health research group. He also serves as the Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Art.
In 2025, Kasper was a contributor the Labs for Liberation Summer Institute on Disability and Design, a project of the Critical Design Lab and . He co-facilitated a summer-long lab on Social Practice and Critical Access and served as a guest speaker for the public lecture series.
In 2023-2024, he was Public Interest Technology faculty affiliate at UMass, and in 2022, he was a Kahn Institute Fellow in Health and Medicine, Culture and Society at Smith College. From 2020 to 2021, he was a Faculty Fellow with the office of Civic Engagement & Service Learning (CESL) at UMass.
Writing & Editing
He is the co-editor of More Art In The Public Eye available with Duke University Press. Kasper’s various contributions to socially-engaged art and design can be found in the books, Feminist Designer: On the personal and political in design (MIT), Art As Social Action: The Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (Skyhorse Press), Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability (Transcript Press), and Bridging Communities Through Socially Engaged Art (Routledge).
Peer-Mentor
As a peer-mentor with New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in Social Practice and as Director of Engagement at More Art, he supported the work of nearly 200 individual artists and activists.
Education & Training
Kasper is a trauma-informed teaching artist certified with the Bartol Foundation.
His undergraduate and professional education merged graphic design, public service, and urban studies. He received a MFA in studio art and social practice from Queens College CUNY with distinctions in digital media and critical theory.
As part of his ongoing research, he is pursuing advanced graduate studies in expressive therapies for community-based arts and learning.
Awards
Kasper was awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from National Arts Strategies (NAS), New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), Assetts for Artists, Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, The Umbrella Art Center, Art & Disability Residency, and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.