Kate DeCiccio is an artist, abolitionist, cultural organizer, creative director and curator nerd who lives in Oakland, CA. Mostly she just wants to dream and build possibility with abolitionist weirdos who believe in unseen possibilities.

“My work centers portraiture for counter narrative, community storytelling & cultural strategy on behalf of abolition and collective liberation. I’m from Central Massachusetts where I grew up on occupied Nipmuc territory on my family’s 4th generation farm. I’m the 3rd generation of my Polish and Italian ancestors and descends from 11 generations of English colonizers. Before working as a artist full time I was a mental health and substance abuse counselor and taught art at San Quentin Prison, St Elizabeths Forensic Psychiatric hospital & Leadership High School. The intersections of creativity, mental illness, addiction and ancestral investigation have been driving themes in my art practice since I was a teenager. I’m committed to repairing the harm of my inherited legacy and working to heal our collective imagination by learning how to stand squarely in truth, accountability, renewed resilience and the dark joy of impossibility that endlessly reveals itself.”

Since 2020, Kate has led a long term project convening staff at Planting Justice in East Oakland together with Hiroyo Kaneko and Malaya Tuyay to use art making as a vehicle to explore the intersections of food justice and abolition.

From 2019-2024, Kate was a Co-Director and Cultural Strategist at Performing Statistics where she led cultural organizing projects supporting youth led campaigns to integrate art into their organizing strategies to end youth incarceration. Today you can see that work at Freedom Constellations.

Check out nokidsinprison.org/experience, a virtual experience of a world where all youth are free.

Past collaborations include work with The People's Paper Coop, The Painted Desert Project, 826 National, Critical Resistance, Survived and Punished, Planting Justice and Dear Frontline, The Women's March, The Science March and March For Our Lives. Her work has been featured The Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, The Daily Show, LA Times and Navajo Times. She’s exhibited at Galeria de La Raza, The Mission Cultural Center, The United States of Women, US Botanic Garden, Betti Ono Gallery, INTO ACTION, Interference Archive and Politicon and is in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.