A media kit (sometimes called a press kit) is a single, ready-to-send package of everything a journalist, curator, festival programmer, or sponsor needs to write about your work — without emailing you back three times to ask for a bio, a headshot, and a better photo of the piece. Almost nobody builds one until they urgently need it. Building it before that point is the whole trick.
What actually belongs in one
- A short bio, in two lengths. A one-sentence version for a byline or program listing, and a 100–150 word version for an article intro. Write both in third person, even if that feels strange — it’s what gets copy-pasted.
- A current headshot and a few process or install shots. High resolution, minimal compression, clearly labeled files (not
IMG_4821.jpg). Include at least one landscape and one portrait crop — publications have different layout needs and won’t crop your only square photo themselves. - One-paragraph descriptions of your two or three most relevant projects. Not your entire portfolio — the pieces you’d actually want written about right now.
- Links, not attachments, for anything large: a portfolio site, a video reel, a GitHub repo if the work is code-based.
- Contact information that goes directly to you, not through a gallery or agent unless that’s genuinely how you want press handled.
- Logos or wordmarks, if you have a studio name or project brand, in both light and dark versions.
The mistakes that make a kit unusable
Everything bundled into one giant PDF. A journalist on deadline wants to grab one photo and your bio text, not extract them from a 40MB PDF. Keep photos as separate files, and put bio text somewhere copy-pasteable (a plain text file, or a web page, not locked inside a PDF layout).
No updated date anywhere. A kit with no visible “last updated” marker gets used even after it’s stale, which is worse than an outdated kit nobody uses — you end up quoted with an exhibition that closed a year ago.
Only one crop or orientation per photo. This is the single most common reason a publication reaches back out instead of just using what you sent — plan for both orientations from the start.
Keeping it current without rebuilding it
The sustainable version of this isn’t a one-time project — it’s a folder (cloud-synced, so the link never breaks) that you update in five minutes whenever something changes: a new exhibition closes, a project description goes stale, or you get a better headshot. Treat “update the media kit” as a five-minute task that follows any major show or release, not a chore you do from scratch when someone finally asks.