Rachel Stevens is an artist, researcher and educator based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary work (sculpture, photography, video, internet archives, artist books, spatial practices, and curatorial projects) is concerned with ecologies and geographies, moving images and archives.
She was recently invited to participate in the 2019 Casa GIAP Creative Ecologies and Decolonial Futures residency in Chiapas, MX, the 2017 NEH Summer Research Institute on Space, Place and the Humanities at Northeastern University and a 2015-2016 year-long collaborative research residency with iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance). As half of the collaboration Oyster City – with Meredith Drum – she created an Augmented Reality walking tour and game about oysters in NYC located on Governors Island, and was commissioned to create a public project for Paths to Pier 42 on the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan. The latter aimed to connect the everyday lives of people who live and work in the Lower East Side to the ecology of the East River and the surrounding estuary, and resulted in the Fish Stories Community Cookbook.
Currently, Rachel is working on a research and film project about the St. Lawrence River and making experimental video with the video publishing cooperative Temporary Files.
Stevens has exhibited and presented at conferences and festivals internationally including: Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC, ISEA in New Mexico and Durban, SA, i-Docs in Bristol, UK, SCMS in Seattle, and Visible Evidence in NYC and Toronto and at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Her work has been supported with residencies and grants from Casa GIAP, Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Italy), iLand, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Polar Circuit (Finland), Puffin Foundation, Signal Culture, Signal Fire and Works on Water at Governors Island in NYC.
Her writing on art and visual culture has been published in Afterimage, Contemporary Magazine, Flash Art, Millennium Film Journal and other publications and she is on the editorial board of Millennium Film Journal, a journal devoted to artist moving image work. In addition to teaching in the Hunter College IMA MFA program, she has also taught media art and related subjects in both practice and theory at Brown University (Modern Culture and Media, Visual Art), Brooklyn College (PIMA MFA Program), the Rhode Island School of Design (Photography) and Queens College (Visual Art). She belongs to the curatorial collective Two Chairs and has been an associate curator at Creative Time. Stevens has an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego, and a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design.
* * *
CONTACT