Kacy McKinney is a visual artist and scholar/educator based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Washington. She works in comics, drawing, illustration, and fiber art and textile design. Kacy spent 15 years teaching at the college level and now works as an independent scholar and artist.

She is the creator of Changing the Narrative: Stories of Student Homelessness and Housing Instability (2022) and the follow up project Epilogue (2024). She edited and designed the comic book Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness (2024). She is now working with artist Daren Todd and Street Roots on a project about street newspaper vendors. These community-based collaborative research projects use comics to build empathy to change how we talk, teach, and think about homelessness and poverty.

In 2025, she released Mourning Attire, a book of comix poetry about grief and loss, told through fiber art, photography, and ink and pastel drawings. You can find Mourning Attire here and at Books with Pictures, Secret Room Press, and the brand new NW Museum of Cartoon Arts.

Kacy has been awarded residencies at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Trailer Blaze (Short Run), Mesa Refuge, PLAYA at Summer Lake, and The Verdancy Project.

Kacy has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative at Portland State, the Community Engaged Research Academy at Portland State, and others.

Kacy is currently Artist-Scholar in Residence at the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative at Portland State University. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Independent Publishing Resource Center and Sisters of the Road.