Caroline Kent was born in Sterling, Illinois, in 1975 and currently lives in Chicago. Kent received a BA from Illinois State University and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. From 2000–2002, she lived in Alba Iulia, Romania, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She is an Assistant Professor in the Art, Theory, and Practice department at Northwestern University. Kent’s practice explores the limits of language and the process of translation through an expanded painting practice. Her practice developed through an open-ended archive of improvisational works on paper; the paintings built out of this context exist in multiple forms, including drawings, sculpture, and performance. She labors to expand the discourse of modernist abstraction by questioning how language might operate in unknown and ever-evolving conditions. The work moves from surface and frame to environment and architecture through acts of translation from one medium to the next.

Kent has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and Jerome Foundation. She was a 2020 Artadia Chicago Awardee and a 2021 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize recipient from the Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, NY, and Ancestral at the Museum of Brazilian Art (M.A.B.), Sao Paulo, Brazil. Kent has shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, MCA Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hill Art Foundation, BAMPFA, the Queens Museum, and the Walker Art Center.