Selena Kearney is a photographer and performance artist raised on the Chehalis Reservation in Washington State. Her work centers Indigenous presence, cultural continuity, and visual sovereignty. Rooted in her Coast Salish heritage, Kearney engages photography as a relational practice—using image and performance to examine colonial systems of representation and to honor lived experience and ancestral connection.

Since 2014, Kearney has served as skipper for the Spirit of the Raven, the elder’s canoe from Suquamish, learning alongside Suquamish Elder Marilyn Wandrey. This role, grounded in responsibility and reciprocity, informs her approach to art and collaboration. Her projects include a portrait archive of Chehalis people, the conceptual photo series Object/Ritual, and the performance-based exhibition Speak to the House, Speak to the Object.

Her monograph, Every Object Has a Ritual, was published by Minor Matters in 2023. Solo exhibitions include Object/Ritual at the Suquamish Museum (2024–25) and Every Object Has a Ritual at Solas Gallery in Seattle (2023). Her work engages the afterlife of Indigenous materials in institutional collections through photography, performance, and collaborative research.

Kearney holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College, and a Certificate of Fine Art Photography from the Photographic Center Northwest. Her practice is rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing, her work foregrounds relational aesthetics, collective memory, and the power of visual storytelling as a form of cultural assertion