Michael Kopp is an artist, educator, and organizer whose practice interrogates the power structures embedded in image-making and image circulation. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Art at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, where he teaches courses in photography, digital media, and socially engaged art. Prior to this, he was the founding director of The Social Practice Lab, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to collaborative, community-centered art that advances equity and public dialogue.
Working through an anti-colonial lens, Michael’s research and creative practice question the social and political dimensions of visual culture: When is art? How is power spatialized? What does it mean to make problems visible through photographs? His work explores the camera as a tool of both representation and resistance, examining how images mediate social relationships, cultural memory, and public space.
Michael has collaborated with institutions including Norton Healthcare, the University of Louisville, Louisville Metro Government, and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. His writing appears in the International Journal of Drug Policy (2022), and his public scholarship is featured on the TED Talk Network (2024). He has presented research at The Ohio State University and Indiana University, and exhibited work internationally in Rome, Italy, and Glasgow, Scotland.
In 2024, with the support of a grant from the Great Meadows Foundation, Michael completed a residency with Arquetopia Foundation in Puebla, Mexico, where his ongoing research engages local heritage, colonial history, and the politics of site-specific image-making.
