Bri Chesler

Bri Chesler is a multidisciplinary artist whose installations explore intimacy, desire, and embodied memory. Treating sensation as an aesthetic language, she combines glass with materials that provoke visceral responses, suspending viewers in the tension between attraction and discomfort.

From a young age, art became a tool for survival, giving form to traumatic experiences she couldn’t verbalize. Through making, she began to understand how those experiences lived in the body. Sculpture offered a way to give physical form to that embodied experience, leading Chesler to study at the Kansas City Art Institute. There, her interest in molten materials led her to glass. Captivated by its sensuality and ability to capture gesture, she made glass central to her practice and relocated to Seattle in 2015.

Chesler’s commitment to art as a means of connection extends into her teaching. For more than a decade, she has taught and mentored youth in juvenile detention programs, alternative schools, and community outreach settings. She is currently developing a mobile glassblowing studio to promote sustainability and connection.

Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and internationally, earning recognition through the Pilchuck Emerging Artist-in-Residence, the McMillen Fellowship, the Saxe Emerging Artist Award, and the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort Grant. In 2024, her solo exhibition Untamed: The Anatomy of Desire was featured at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. Chesler is currently a nominee for the 2027 USA Artist Fellowship and will exhibit at the Fuller Craft Museum in fall 2027.