Kacy McKinney is a self-taught visual artist and scholar/educator based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Washington. She works in comics, drawing, illustration, and textile and garment design. After 15 years teaching in higher education, she recently launched Bushtit and is focused on work as an independent scholar/artist.
She is the creator of Changing the Narrative: Stories of Student Homelessness and Housing Instability (2022) and the follow up project Epilogue (2024). She edited and designed the comic book Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness (2024). These community-based collaborative research projects use comics to build empathy to change how we talk, teach, and think about homelessness and poverty.
She is currently Artist-Scholar in Residence at the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative at Portland State University, and she serves on the Board of Directors of the Independent Publishing Resource Center.