Tim Kennedy was born in Buffalo, New York. His childhood and adolescence were spent in Western Michigan and Pittsburgh respectively. He received a BFA in Painting from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977 and an MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College in 1984. He attended the Skowhegan School during the summers of 1979 and 1980.
 
Kennedy has received individual artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis and the Clark Hulings Fund. His work has been reviewed in The New York Sun, The New York Observer and the Indianapolis Star. Articles on his work have appeared in The Artist’s Magazine, American Artist Magazine, Watercolor Magazine and an interview with him was featured on Larry Groff’s blog Painting Perceptions. He exhibits his work at First Street Gallery in New York where he has had seven solo exhibitions
 
Kennedy is a Senior Lecturer of Painting at Indiana University in Bloomington where he has taught since 2000. He previously held an Assistant Professor position at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan and was a Visiting Artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1997. During the summer of 2015 he co-taught  the workshop Tonal Painting / Modernist Grid with the artist Eve Mansdorf at the Jerusalem Studio School in Civita Castellana in Civita Castellana, Italy.                               
 
Tim Kennedy primarily works with material from the observed world. His work embraces all of the genres but he has repeatedly returned to themes of the figure found in domestic interior and landscape settings. Most of his work is done from observation and directly from the motif.