photo by Jim Barcus
The Kansas City artist explores the complexities of the human psyche through her art and therapeutic practice
“I’m compelled to create art that simultaneously addresses both individual psychological destruction and the dynamic, nurturing aspects of the human experience.” — Kat Dison Nechlebova
Multidisciplinary artist and art therapist Kat Dison Nechlebova explores the complexities of the human psyche through her expansive creative and therapeutic practice, intersecting psychology, philosophy and art.
Nechlebova’s artwork over the last 10 years has traversed assemblage/bricolage sculpture, installation, performance-based art, wearable art as kinetic instruments, audiovisual art, and sound. Prevailing explorations of Jungian psychology, archetypes and alchemy inform and infuse her art and therapeutic practice.
After graduating with a BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007, Nechlebova embarked on a path connecting her interests in art and psychology. She earned her MA in art therapy & counseling from Southwestern College in Santa Fe in 2014, launched her private practice, “Art Therapy & Integrative Counseling” in 2016 while living in Denver, and completed certification in Applied Existential Coaching from Boulder Psychotherapy Institute in 2022.
In addition to her diverse living experiences across the U.S., her expansive world travels include Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Morocco, France, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Cuba.
She was drawn back to Kansas City in 2021, and is currently teaching sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute while developing new projects in her home studio, running her private practice, and playing theremin in the experimental band BCR with Dwight Frizzell.
In a recent conversation, she reflected on her “a la carte life” as an artist, art therapist, musician and educator, the human challenge of confronting and dismantling trauma to truly know oneself, and her passion for making and sharing art as a method for achieving transformational healing and empowering change.
“I always wanted to feel comfortable, but never have. External factors shape who we are. I’m attuned to that and recognize the need to go to uncomfortable places to figure out who we are and live it.”
Her art served as “a constant in life when location was not.”
Born in 1985 in Houston, Texas, Nechlebova was raised in a military family. She recalls “always being the new kid” with frequent family moves across the U.S. spanning Alabama, Georgia, Connecticut, Arkansas and Tennessee. She was happiest living near her maternal and paternal grandparents in Huntsville and Talladega, Alabama, and as a teen, found refuge in the music and life of Memphis, where she lived for the summer before coming to KCAI.
Her DIY interdisciplinary approach as a KCAI student included explorations in fiber, glass, new media, sound and a “fascination for weird instruments.” She began playing the theremin and performing in gigs with BCR as a student.
In 2009, she received a Charlotte Street Foundation Residency and was selected for the first Artist INC residency. She considered an MFA at Yale, but made the pivotal decision to pursue art therapy as a viable career, and expand her art into a shared space supporting mental health and wellness.
“Art and psychology are concepts that organically fit together, but to offer them as a service was something I had to figure out on my own,” she told CanvasRebel magazine in 2023.
She took classes at UMKC to prepare for graduate work in Santa Fe, gaining nonprofit experience as an art director and educator at Boys & Girls Clubs, and as a manager and mechanic at “The Hub,” a free bike-repair shop at UMKC run by Bridging the Gap.
In Santa Fe, she gained experience as an art therapist, clinical counselor and art educator, and while building her private practice in Denver, directed reintegration support services at DenverWorks. During this period, she also began exploring her ancestral connection to the Vikings and was exposed to the art of Nick Cave.
She draws from an expansive lexicon of influences and disciplines including Indo-European spiritual practices, alchemical duality, archetypal psychology, ancient wisdom traditions, interpersonal neurobiology, spiritually based traditions of Jungian psychology, and existential phenomenology. She utilizes holotropic breathwork, dream analysis, sound healing and existential coaching as a therapist.
“I use my experiences as both an artist and therapist to portray human behavioral patterns visually and experientially, providing tangible models to understand otherwise unconscious behavior,” she writes in her artist statement.
She imbues herself into all of her work, describing part of her creative process as “making nests” and “building maps” to try and solve her own struggles and create a safe world. She balances a tension between probing inward — interweaving and transforming accumulations of found objects and materials into immersive, multivalent sculptural and figural abstractions — while reaching outward through interspersed realms of sculpture, performance, kinetic art, music and sound.
Since returning to KC, her connective range of projects include Arcadia, a magnificent series of “multidisciplinary wearable art conceived as kinetic instruments,” debuted at the 2022 Kemper Museum Gala, and The Empyrean Odyssey of Metal and Seas, an exploratory series of seven mixed-media assemblage sculptures depicting the seven stages of alchemical transmutation, featured in a solo exhibition at Kansas City Artists Coalition in 2024.
Most recently, The Alchemist, a majestic, sculptural assemblage newly created for the recent exhibition, The Supreme Point: Thresholds of Emergence, curated by Elizabeth Kirsch at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, radiates a wondrous, mystical dynamism.
At home in Kansas City, Nechlebova is poised for what comes next. “Something about Kansas City — the music, food, people, energy — it’s better than anything I’ve found in the world.”
