About the Work
Diedra Krieger creates immersive environments for play from post-consumer water bottles. Plastic waste is sculpted, networked, and sometimes animated through mechatronics and bioinspired robotics. It is both material and protagonist. The work addresses the politics of drinking water access while functioning as social architectures that invite gathering, ludic engagement, and collective reckoning with what we discard.
Her performance video operates on a more intimate, immediate scale. By staging the domestic, which is typically cordoned off from public life, Krieger exposes the comedy, intimacy, and vulnerability of motherhood and art practice as separate, colliding, and ongoing experiments. Whether collaborating with complex robotic systems or working within the home, her practice creates temporary, unscripted structures for unconventional social connection and public dialogue.
About the Artist
Diedra Krieger is an artist, curator, and lab manager working at the intersection of art and technology. Her interdisciplinary practice bridges the worlds of visual art and academic engineering, exploring sustainability, mechatronics, bioinspired robotics, and community-engaged public space installations.
Krieger’s collaborative work is recognized within major international robotics frameworks. In 2025, she served on the program committee for Arts in Robotics at ICRA 2025, where her collaborative project, Not-So-Micro Plastic, received the Sustainability Award. She co-organized the robotics art workshop for ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan, and her work has been juried into international robotics art competitions including IROS (2023) and RSS (2021). Merging academic resources with creative practice, Krieger directed the 2022 Robotics Art Residency at GRASP at PERCH—a project she co-conceptualized with Orkan Telhan and funded via a Sachs Collaborative Provosts Interdisciplinary Grant.
Deeply rooted in the Philadelphia arts ecosystem, Krieger has been an active member of the artist-run curatorial collective Grizzly Grizzly since 2021 and previously served on Philadelphia’s Art in City Hall Committee. She was a 2012-13 Artist-in-Residence at 40th Street AirSpace in West Philadelphia.
Her ongoing public art project, Plastic Fantastic, a 16-foot geodesic dome constructed from post-consumer water bottles, has been exhibited nationally at venues including the National Folk Festival (2019), Anchorage Museum (2014), Governor’s Island (2011), and Art in the Open on the banks of the Schuylkill River (2010). Her performance video art has been exhibited at Vox Populi, Projects Gallery, and Video Snacks.
Professionally, Krieger is the Lab Manager for the EPM Lab at Penn Engineering, building on over a decade of experience as the Lab Coordinator for Kod*lab, a legged robotics research lab (2012-2023). She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MA in Development Studies from Monash University, and a BA from New York University.
Selected Publications and Awards
Sustainability Award, Not-So-Micro Plastic (Collaborative Project), Arts in Robotics at ICRA (2025)
Honorable Mention, The Art Blog Writing Challenge (2020)
Poster Presenter, Science Through Narrative Symposium, Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology / Women in Computing Conference (2018)
Selected Press
The Art Blog, “Grizzly Grizzly talks curating others and not showing their own work,” by Elizabeth Johnson
The Art Blog, “Two for the New Year! A discussion group rises in 2018… and Diedra Krieger working art + science on all burners, curating; postering; and getting a grant for the Science Fair“
Hyperallergic, “Mail Art Bulletin: Message in a Plastic Bottle“, by Hrag Vartanian
The Inquirer, Artworks are in, but not of, Eastern State Penitentiary, by Edith Newhall
The Art Blog, “Vox VI – objects of desire”, https://www.theartblog.org/2010/07/vox-vi-objects-of-desire
Selected Curatorial Projects
2026
Four on the Floor: Zach Hill and Kim Miller, Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia PA
Grounded Attention: Erin Mallea and Ally Messer, Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia, PA
Dancing Through Life: Erin Rose Boyle, The Arts League, Philadelphia, PA
2025
Entity Cramming: Soso Capaldi and Eric Anthony Berdis, Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia, PA
Contact
diedrak at gmail
Social media
https://www.instagram.com/diedra_krieger/
https://www.instagram.com/plasticfantasticart/