just breathe

Kim Tateo is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and educator in Upstate NY. She is also the Executive Director and Farm Manager of Friends of Tivoli Lake Preserve and Farm, where she encourages people to connect with the land and each other through the garden and green spaces. 

Tateo was born in 1984 in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted when she was three months old and grew up in Iowa, appreciating open spaces and sunsets. She received a BA in Music from the University of Iowa. After college, she relocated to New York City, where she resided for nearly ten years. She loved exploring and collecting stories. She now lives in upstate NY and still appreciates sunsets, but she also loves adventuring to the Adirondacks and finding magic in the everyday.

Her paintings are capsules of self-expression translating into dreamy landscapes and whimsical worlds filled with color, creatures, and tiny details. She believes in a world of interconnectedness ~ that our hearts are tied to some incredibly beautiful thread that connects us all. She paints the scenes that the beings of our dreams see, full of reminders of beauty, love, and places where kindness doesn’t matter; it just is. She works with bold colors, glitter, broken glass, gems, gold leaf, and iridescent paints and uses blacklight responsive paints to reveal a hidden layer that is meant to remind us of the unseen things that are always surrounding us.

Tateo creates experiences for artists to connect and collaborate through collaborative painting and her “Snail Mail Art Collaboration,” a project with artists worldwide exploring impermanence through art and snail mail. She writes songs for her project, Sparkle Garden, and explores ephemerality and presence through improvisation with “What Blooms in Moonlight,” a live performance painting and sound-immersive event. 

She has participated in various exhibitions, art fairs, shows, and public art projects in New York City, Los Angeles, and the Capital Region. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Iowa and is an MFA Candidate from the University of Albany 2025.

When she is not painting, she is singing or shepherding a flock of sheep (sometimes both simultaneously). Kim has studied plant spirit medicine and herbalism at the Gaia School of Healing since 2021. Her work is greatly influenced by her time with plants and animals.

With that, she invites you to dive in, take a moment, escape into imagination, and “look a little closer.”