Kirsha Kaechele

Life and career

Kaechele was born in Topanga Canyon, California, and raised in Guam, Micronesia and Japan. Her father was a retired RAND Corporation aerospace engineer and early practitioner of Rolfing. In 1994, Kaechele began an informal education with travel over land to more than fifty countries in a seven-year period- a hands-on investigation of the idea that life designs itself. During this period, she met and mentored with a variety of thinkers, including Biosphere 2 creator John P. Allen, chemist Albert Hoffman, writers Tom Robbins and John C. Lilly, John Perry Barlow, Rodleen Getsic, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, artist Peter Nadin, musician Mike Watt and a pair of German architects building sustainably in Maui, Hawaii. In 1999, Kaechele lived in remote southern Lebanon and worked with a group of leading writers, philosophers and historians in Sur (Tyre). In 1995, she worked with the Shipibo ayahuasca shamans in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1996, she performed with La Mama theater in New York City.

In 2007 she founded Life is Art Foundation | KKProjects, an art space composed of six abandoned houses in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. The foundation invites local and international artists to create site-specific installations utilizing the houses and surrounding ecological and social environment as medium. Exhibitions have included artists from emerging to Tony Oursler, Mel Chin, Keith Sonnier and Robert Rauschenberg.

Kaechele also purchased several houses in post Katrina New Orleans for purposes as an art project. The Life is Art Foundation is founded on an appreciation for ecological systems and natural order. The application of systems-based thinking to life and art is the core mission, as expressed through projects that marry art with architecture, ecology, agriculture and human social order. The foundation serves as a test site for cutting edge ideas in these fields.

As of April 2011, Kaechele's houses in New Orleans have been abandoned.

Kaechele's current curatorial work includes a land art exhibition of an acre and a half living sugar cane sculpture in Theriot, rural Louisiana, by Norwegian artist Anne Senstad, as well as twenty, large-scale site-specific installations in New Orleans’ City Park and Botanical Gardens in partnership with Voodoo Experience.

In March 2014, Kaechele and art collector David Walsh married.

On July 20th 2015 Kaechele and partner David Walsh gave birth to their child Sunday Walsh.