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MaPó Kinnord grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her first training in ceramics through Cleveland’s Quaker-founded alternative high school, the School on Magnolia. She apprenticed with several production potters before receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1984. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University in 1994. Arriving in New Orleans in 1995, she now serves as Department Head, and an Associate Professor of Art at Xavier University.

A well-respected educator, Kinnard has taught workshops in Matsue, Japan, as well as the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.  Her Contemplative Clay Project explores clay-working as a meditative practice. A solo exhibition, Outside In, Improvisations of: The Ceramic Work of MaPó Kinnord, was mounted at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2021. A lifelong scholar, she has researched the traditional and contemporary art of Ghana extensively, and has produced video documentation of the traditional pottery, kiln building, and ceramic architecture of West Africa.