Jenny Kendler (b. 1980, New York City) is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activist, naturalist and wild forager who lives in Chicago and various forests. She is currently the first Artist-in-Residence with Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Kendler helps run artist residency ACRE and art/research/activism initiative Deep Time Chicago. Alongside an interdisciplinary team, she was recently awarded a major grant for her community-engagement project Garden for a Changing Climate.

Kendler holds a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (2002, summa cum laude) and a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006).

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at museums and biennials including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Albright-Knox (Buffalo, NY), The Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), iMOCA (Indianapolis), the DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India), the Yeosu International Art Festival biennial (Korea), the inaugural Chicago Biennial, and the upcoming 3rd Terrain Biennial.

Her work has also been included in exhibitions at Exit Art (NYC), La Box at les Écoles Nationale Supérieures D’art (France), Claremorris Gallery (Ireland), Root Division (San Francisco), Kristi Engle (Los Angeles), Public Pool (Detroit), and in Chicago at Columbia College, Johalla Projects, and Gallery 400 among others. She has been commissioned to create interactive, environmentally-engaged public art projects locations such as Chicago's Millennium Park for the Art Institute of Chicago, The Lincoln Park Conservatory glasshouse for Experimental Sound Studio, Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the Louisville Riverwalk and a tropical forest in Nosara, Costa Rica.

She has been invited to speak about her environmentally-engaged, activist practice at institutions and symposiums including at the Wexner Center for the Arts, SxSW Eco, the Goethe-Institut, Northwestern University and delivered the closing lecture at the Shapiro Research Symposium at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kendler is co-founder of the artist website platform OtherPeoplesPixels, and created the The OPPfund, which gives grants to arts, environmental and social justice organizations, and awards the MAKER Grant each year to two socially or environmentally engaged artists in partnership with Chicago Artists' Coalition.

She is also the co-creator of The Endangered Species Print Project, which creates limited-edition art prints to raise funds for critically endangered species, has exhibited at spaces like the Notebaert Nature Museum, and has to date has raised almost $15,000 for conservation of over 20 species.

The Center for Biological Diversity's Endangered Species Condom Project, for which she created art, was profiled in The New York Times and featured on a billboard in Times Square. Her work has been covered in Orion Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Businessweek, The American Scholar, Juxtapoz, Mashable, onEarth Magazine, Chicago Magazine, ArtSlant, Hyperallergic—and she has been interviewed on NPR and by Chicago's ABC7 News, among others. Kendler and her work have appeared on the cover of the Chicago Reader three times, most recently accompanying a 6-page feature article.