From KCRW and Wikipedia: Kristine McKenna wrote for The Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998 and was one of the first mainstream journalists chronicling the early L.A. punk rock scene. She was Music Editor for the influential avant-garde arts publication Wet, and the West Coast Editor of NME. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Artnews, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and many other publications.

Kristine McKenna
Kristine McKenna

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Administration grant in 1976, and a Critics Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art in 1991.

McKenna co-curated the 1998 exhibition Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk for Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica. She was co-curator of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, a traveling group exhibition that opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2005. She is producer and co-writer of The Cool School, a documentary about L.A.’s first avant-garde gallery, and her book The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin was published by Steidl in 2009.

In 2010 she partnered with Donna Wingate and Lorraine Wild to launch the publishing imprint Foggy Notion Books.

In October 2015 it was announced that she was co-writing filmmaker David Lynch's "quasi-memoir" titled Life & Work. The book, retitled Room to Dream, was published in June 2018. She has participated in Lynch's "Festival of Disruption," doing onstage interviews with Lynch, Frank Gehry, Ed Ruscha, Sheryl Lee and others.

She edited her many conversations with musician Dan Hicks into his posthumous autobiography I Scare Myself, published in 2017.

She contributed to the following programs:

Program Air date Series Cast
Three Shingles 1996-01-14 Somewhere Out There Kristine McKenna, Arthur Miller, David Rapkin, Joe Frank
Just Get Me Out Of Here 1996-03-17 Somewhere Out There Joe Frank
Clement At Christmas 1999-12-12 The Other Side Clement von Franckenstein, Laura Esterman, Joe Frank
The Nature Of Things 2000-04-03 The Other Side Larry Block, Zachary Block, Michael Meloan, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank
Karma (Part 5) 2000-05-21 The Other Side Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank
Karma (Part 7) 2000-06-18 The Other Side Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Debi Mae West, Joe Frank
Bad Karma 2000-07-09 The Other Side Jack Kornfield, Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Ruth Seymour, Joe Frank
Karma Don't Deny Me 2000-07-30 The Other Side Larry Block, Jack Kornfield, Kristine McKenna, Debi Mae West, Mike Meloan, Joe Frank
Pledge Drive Rough Cuts 2000-08-01 The Other Side Kristine McKenna, Larry Block, David Rapkin, Joe Frank
Karma Redux 2000-10-01 The Other Side Larry Block, Jack Kornfield, Kristine McKenna, Debi Mae West, Joe Frank
Waiting For Karma 2000-10-15 The Other Side Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Zachary Block, Debi Mae West, Joe Frank
Karma Memories 2000-10-22 The Other Side Debi Mae West, Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, David Rapkin, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank
Fire And Ice 2001-03-04 The Other Side Debi Mae West, Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Joe Frank
Margarita 2001-07-08 The Other Side Larry Block, David Rapkin, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank
Terminal 2001-08-05 The Other Side Larry Block, Zachary Block, Kristine McKenna, David Rapkin, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank
Endings 2002-01-20 The Other Side Larry Block, Kristine McKenna, Jack Kornfield, Joe Frank