Shirley Kaneda

Shirley Kaneda (born 1951) is an artist, professor, and writer on art, based in New York City.

Shirley Kaneda is an American artist who was born in Tokyo to Korean-born parents; Korean, Japanese, and English were spoken in her childhood home. She earned a BFA at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, in 1976 and has continued to live and work in New York.

Shirley Kaneda is an abstract painter. Her large oil paintings on canvas have been described as "neon-hued, wavy, biomorphic," and "all about the state of liquidity." In discussing her own work, Kaneda once explained, "I think of myself as continuing the process of demystifying the ideation of values, such as the heroic, the aggressive, the optical, and the rational, that used to be associated with the masculine....I use my work to metaphorically promote such nonheroic themes as the decorative, beauty, fluidity, diversity, and so on."

In 1999 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow in the category of Fine Arts; she has also earned fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Elizabeth Foundation. Her works have been exhibited in galleries across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Kaneda has taught art at Virginia Commonwealth University as the Thalheimer Faculty Fellow/assistant professor (1999–2001), at Claremont Graduate University (2001–2003), and since 2003 as Professor at Pratt Institute in New York.

Kaneda has also been a contributing editor to BOMB magazine.