Kendra Kirchmer

Assistant Professor
Interior Architecture & Product Design

2001B Seaton Hall
920 N Martin Luther King Jr. Drive
Manhattan, KS 66506

Assistant Professor Kendra Kirchmer received a Master of Fine Arts in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 where she was also awarded the President’s Scholarship. She received a Bachelor of Architecture, with a minor in Philosophy from Kansas State University in 2003. She is the founder of Studio Kirchmer, a small-batch furniture and object studio. Her designs have earned international and national recognition through exhibitions in Milan, Italy and in New York. Notably, her work was selected for inclusion in the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) Studio class of 2017.

Before pursuing her master’s, she practiced commercial and residential architecture at award-winning design firms in Kansas City (Hufft) and in Boston (Gensler and Hacin + Associates). This variety of work, merging of disciplines, and range of scale has given her insight the very particular ways in which people live, work, and play, and how those experiences are impacted and enhanced through design.

Professor Kirchmer’s teaching practice is informed by her research interests which include: the built environmentas a social determinant of health, transdisciplinary collaboration, design activism, design equity, human-centereddesign, furniture design, transfer of tacit knowledge, and craft.