Laura Kina is a queer, mixed-race Uchinanchu artist-scholar and breast cancer survivor whose artistic and scholarly projects address Asian American and Okinawan diasporic art. She is a Vincent de Paul Professor at The Art School at DePaul University. Kina was born in Riverside, CA (Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, Serrano territory), grew up in Poulsbo, WA (Suquamish and Port Gamble S'Klallam territory),  and is based in Chicago (traditional lands of the Three Fires Confederacy--Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa nations as well as the Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, Menominee, Illinois Confederacy, and Peoria).

Kina received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994 and MFA Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. Her artworks have exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums including the Chicago Cultural Center, India Habitat Centre, India International Centre, Japanese American National Museum, Nehuru Art Centre, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Spertus Museum, and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience.

Kina is a 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grantee. Through 3Arts, she is a 2021 Make A Wave artist, a 2019 Joan Mitchell Center Fellow, a 2018 3AP Project awardee, and 2013 Ragdale Fellow. Her illustrated children’s book Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos, written by Lee A. Tonouchi (Bess Press, 2019) was awarded a 2020 Skipping Stones Honor award for Multicultural and International Books. 

Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis co-edited War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013). Along Jan Christian Bernabe, Kina co-edited Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017). She is a curator for the Virtual Asian American Art Museum – a digital humanities project led by New York University in partnership with the Smithsonian and Getty Research Institute. Kina is a series editor for The University of Washington Press for the “Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture” book series. Yasuko Takezawa and Kina co-edited a special issue of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal Vol 6. Issue 1-2 (July 2020)- “Trans-Pacific Japanese Diaspora Art: Encountering and Envisioning Minor-Transnationalism.” Kina is also co-editor, along with Chang Tan and Tina Chen, of the Fall 2022 special issue 8.2 of Verge: Studies in Global Asias – “Visualizing Asias: Interventions in Asian and Asian Diasporic Art.”