Kythe Heller

Faculty, Language and Thinking Program

Primary Academic Program: Language and Thinking Program

Biography: Kythe Heller is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work spans text, film, music, performance, and multimedia social practice. She earned a ThD/PhD at Harvard University in Comparative Studies in Religion, with a PhD secondary field in Literary Arts, Film, and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice. Previously, she received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English Literature from Reed College.



 Recently published work includes a collection of poems, Firebird (Arrowsmith), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and several critical studies on medieval and contemporary mysticism and spirituality, phenomenology of the senses, aesthetics, and the arts, including “An Ethnography of Spirituality” in Arvo Pårt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press), “Living Backwards” in Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and “The Heart Receptive of Every Form: Representations of Fire in the unio mystica of Mahomet” (Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal). She has received fellowships and grant awards from the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Film, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited across the United States and Canada.



She is also the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, a global art and research collective in the future of the human spirit, based at Harvard Divinity School and creating work to address contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice,and technology. She edits the international art and culture journal Forecast, and is a poet on the faculty of Bard College's Language and Thinking Program.
Phone: 845-758-7141
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Department: Language and Thinking Program