Feature by Katja Treadwell
Photos by Sophia Zhu
Kira Pipkins (CC '27) is a Visual Arts major and a student athlete at Columbia University, where she is the captain of the Columbia Women’s Wrestling Team. A four-time state wrestling champion (and the first woman to hold such a title in New Jersey history), Kira found growing up that the only natural way to express herself was on the mat — that is, until she discovered painting and photography.
A wave of perfume announced Kira Pipkins’ arrival (CC ‘27) before she even walked into view. Standing with my back to her art studio’s building on 115th, I saw her up the street: clad in a loose pink sweatshirt, track pants, running shoes, and clutching a bundle of edible English lavender from the Columbia Greenmarket as she whisked us inside.
“My friend’s girlfriend bakes, so now she can use this,” she noted with a wide smile, referencing the fragrant bouquet as the elevator carried us up to the third floor of Watson Hall. Kira’s studio was decorated with a blend of old and recent artworks and a coffee table adjacent to two beanbags, where we immediately made ourselves comfortable. An easel in front of us quickly caught my attention before we started speaking: a portrait of a headless man on a stool, splattering blood everywhere. When questioned, Kira simply said: “There’s an influence of horror in a lot of the art that I make. I like to represent the fear of something being really wrong without it being horrific.”
Yet, unsettling imagery is only one of many genres that Kira’s art plays into. Primarily lending charcoal and acrylic paints, Kira organizes her portfolio into four distinct themes: wrestling — a sport she has competed in since elementary school — hair, identity and travel. Her connection to those themes, however, traces back to her childhood.
Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Kira remains a New Yorker at heart. Her dad, a Staten Island native, ensured she and her two older brothers consistently visited his family across the river. When her parents enrolled the siblings in the Bloomfield public school system, they couldn’t have predicted that wrestling would become the focal point of their childhood. Inspired by her eldest brother, who joined the team in sixth grade, Kira grew up immersed in wrestling. Compared to the other activities she pursued — cheerleading, volleyball, gymnastics, occasionally dance — she remembers wrestling as “the least unisex at the time.”
“Even for football, you would know at least one girl who was playing it,” Kira said, “But for wrestling, I didn’t know of any girls. I happened to start making art around the same time.”
Kira immediately knew that wrestling would be different when she started in 5th grade, and she wasn’t wrong. The sport quickly transformed her life and grew her confidence, naturally becoming the primary subject of her artwork in school from that point on. Notably, it gave her a completely distinct lens through which to view human movement and form.
“I’ve always been interested in sports photography because, as an athlete, you’re going to see people constantly taking pictures of you,” Kira said, “but I also want to expose people to wrestling, and show them that it becomes a lifestyle.”
Kira explores the intersection between wrestling and art with her senior thesis. Currently, she’s examining the parallels between combat sports and partner dancing, a hobby she shares with her girlfriend, whom she met in 2024. Looking around the studio as she spoke, I clearly saw that Kira’s thesis has taken over her creative mind. The walls are covered with dynamic charcoal figures captured mid-dance or mid-tackle, pinned beside her photography series documenting the Columbia women’s wrestling team over the past few years.
Still, wrestling hasn’t always worked in Kira’s favor. In 2021, she developed a chronic eye injury after being poked during a match. Today, the injury manifests as persistent flashes of light in her left eye: a detail she channels into her self-portraits, where her eyes are painted a milky white. This is the horror Kira referenced to me in the beginning of our conversation, I realized. At first glance, Kira’s charcoal portrait captures a moment of agony. A figure (Kira) clutches their head in distress, surrounded by a background of panicked inner monologue (“MY EYE HURTS,” and “WHAT IF I CAN’T SEE”). While the anxiety is clear, the artwork also relies on quiet motifs, like the blank white eyes. By replacing the pupils with white, Kira evokes a classic trope of horror — of possession and a loss of humanity — yet grounds it in her own humanistic experience.
Self Portrait, 2024. Charcoal on paper.
In January 2025, Kira also developed three bulging discs in her lumbar spine, which she detailed to be a worse injury than her eye. The back injury severely limited her ability to wrestle at Columbia, forcing a shift in how she engages with the sport.
“Since I’ve been injured, it’s been the first time I’ve actually made more art about wrestling,” she said. “It’s a chance for me to still be thinking about wrestling.”
Another defining element of Kira’s self-portraits is hair; earlier this year, she shot and developed black-and-white portraits of friends whipping their hair back, their intricate braids in dramatic movement. Kira explained that this exploration is tied to her mom, who didn’t have experience taking care of her natural hair growing up.
“For me and other Black people, hair is an important thing,” Kira said. “So the focus here is a story of my mom not understanding her own identity and having to learn it with me.”
She also developed a photo series of afro hair combs in the form of a photogram, or a photographic image made without a camera. Kira explained her process to me in detail: she placed the comb directly onto photosensitive paper in a dark room and exposed it to light using an enlarger.
“That’s actually the pick that I use,” she recalled while laughing quietly. “If you zoom in on the photogram, there’s some hair on it that I didn’t see originally.”
As for the future of her artwork and career, Kira is keeping her options open. She wants to lean more into photography — exploring nature after a recent photo trip to New Mexico — as well as pushing deeper into sports photography. Long term, she aims to lead visual direction for brands, whether starting as a designer or creative director. No matter where her career takes her, Kira knows she’s an athlete at heart.
“I’ll always see wrestling in my future,” Kira admitted. “I’m actually looking at graduate school right now to maybe get in more years of wrestling, and afterwards try out for some world teams.”
As our idle chatter ran dry, Kira reminded me that her art remains deeply rooted in naturalism and connection; “I use charcoal with everything because I feel so connected,” she explained. “Paper is a natural material, and charcoal is just burnt wood. I could be someone two thousand years ago doing the exact same thing.”
When injuries kept her away from wrestling, painting and photography became Kira’s way of holding onto it. Today, she channels that same energy into her relationships, drawing inspiration from family and friends: a testament to the fact that her art is built on shared human connection. I left Kira’s art studio that day with an urge to buy my friends flowers, but more than that, with a completely new perspective on my own creative path.